Not Consistently Interesting

Slumdog Millionaire
Vikas Swarup
Scribner (2008),
Paperback, 336 pages
Rated 3 stars of 5 possible

Slumdog Millionaire is a take-off on the famous quiz show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire. When an 18 year old waiter incredibly answers all 12 questions correctly, he is arrested and locked in jail while the company sponsoring the show tries to prove the waiter cheated so they won't have to pay him. Each chapter of the book is a chapter of the young waiter's life, and it illustrates how he knew the answers to the valuable questions.

The questions asked covered a variety of subjects. The possiblity that our protagonist could have enough knowledge of to answer the questions correctly, seemed like a long shot, yet each and every time, the young man was able to give the proper answer. As each question was asked, I was thinking, someone from that game show must have known the protagonist's life story to always be able to choose a question he could answer... yet this was never revealed in the book.

While I did find a few points of interest in this overly long tale, I did not find this novel consistently interesting. In fact some chapters were long enough to tempt me to skip some of the tale, which temptation I mostly resisted until the end, when I did skip some of the chapter just before the finale. I found that long chapter to be just too uninteresting. The ending itself was predictable, the book nothing I would recommend to most readers.

This review has been simultaneously published on Amazon.com, Dragon Views and LibraryThing.