I have read many books set in India lately so I thought this would be right up my alley: India, father/son relationships, sports. Unfortunately I never got engaged with the characters and eventually stopped reading. DNF. I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via Net Galley.

Manju is the second son of Mohan Kumar, and the second-best bastman in the world, or he should be as per his father’s contract with Lord Subramanya. The first-best batsman in the world should be his brother, Radha. But fate seems to favour Manju. Manju however doesn’t care much for cricket and plays because he fears his tyrannical father. He would rather be a forensic scientist.When Manju meets Javed Ansari –rich, gay and bold, he makes decisions that throw everything and everyone around him into a maelstorm.

The book is set in Mumbai, the home of some of the greatest cricketing legends, such as Gavaskar and Sachin. Adiga’s Mumbai is one that evokes some sharp memories, such as his description of the Chheda Nagar temple, which I’ve visited often. Or the Oval Maidan, where I’ve gone to see school-level cricket being played (and played a game of handball myself).

But there is a hint of unfamiliarity when he talks of cricket. Now cricket is religion for a lot of Indians, but I don’t see the point of seeing any sport being played (play a sport! what is the point of watching it being played?!), know only how the game is played but don’t care much for it. Adiga, however, takes us into cricket clubs and sporting grounds. He takes us into the minds of the parents who push their children to play cricket, the coaches who strive to turn them into the next Tendulkar, the businessmen that see children as investments, and into the minds of young cricketers themselves.

Adiga’s exploration of relationships is enjoyable as he brings his characters to life. Radha and Manju’s relationship with their father is the epitome of bad relationships. Stuck witha father who won’t allow them to shave, or drive, conducts complete physical check-ups weekly, and insists on them playing only cricket, the resentment bottled within them seeps through the pages. The most interesting relationship however, is that between Javed and Manju. Manju is both attracted by and repelled by Javed, who is gay. His inner conflict, as to whether he wants Javed as a friend and support, or as a lover forms the crux of this book.

Adiga’s prose is not quite poetic, but it isn’t drab either. I find myself struggling to describe it. It is detailed and descriptive, and helps to build images, but there is something fuzzy around the edges, as if we were seeing the images through some distorted lens. The pacing seemed to lag a bit, but while I found it easy to set the book aside, I would always come back to it.

Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day is about cricket, circumstances, choices, consequences and coming of age. It is conflicted and frustrated, just like its characters, and definitely worth a read.

FTC disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for this honest review.
https://thereadingdesk.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/book-review-selection-day/

Selection Day is a wonderful story set largely in the poorest parts of India and filled with complex and interesting characters. It is the story of a father's passionate hopes for his sons to rise above his own station in life and become heroes in the world of cricket. The father places extreme pressures on his sons to fulfill the dream he has for them and, by association, to experience the glory of having his children become cricket idols. It is the story of how the father's single-minded drive impacts on his sons' relationships with him, with each other, with the wider community and with the game of cricket, itself. It is also a story about prejudice and acceptance, denial and acknowledgement and ultimately the realisation that we are the product of all our experiences. Highly recommended. Thanks to Scribner and Netgalley for the ARC.

I did not finish this book as I did not engage with this story at all.

I have read other books by Aravind Adiga in the past which I enjoyed, but somehow just could not get into this one. I found the dialogue to be cleverly written (and I think it would be great to listen to in audio) but I did not connect to any of the characters or to their love of the game of cricket. Great book, just not for me.

Selection Day was such a satisfying challenge to read, in a number of ways. First, as someone who loves sports but hadn't the first clue about cricket, it was interesting and gratifying to learn about the game through the Kumar brothers. Those brothers, Radha and Manju, are complex and challenging, and never boring. Driven by their father to be the best (and second-best) cricket batsmen in the world, they struggle and strive to meet (or defy) his expectations in ways that broke my heart and made me cheer.

To begin with, Adiga's style is particularly intricate, though well researched and might seem confusing at times. Perhaps for some people this might be an obstacle for properly enjoying Selection Day.

The book is a coming of age story of two boys, their life depicted as real India, where stars are born from the slums and can fall at the first mistake, where parental control can be overwhelming and class hierarchy is defining the norm. Cricket becomes more than a sport, more than a passion, rather the means to succeeding and not disappointing the hopes of the family.

The characters are complex, unusual, psychologically tormented and even immature at times. There is such a pure struggle in Manju as opposed to his brother's simple mindedness. Adiga managed to beautifully create strong characters which are all suffering at the same time from personal struggles.

The plot is centered around performance and it seems Adiga is the first writer to write about the post-1983 phenomenon in Cricket.

Somehow each character gets a voice and tells his perspective creating a web of thoughts and developments. This I consider a great literary achievement through its complexity. The ending ia flat in a way, do not expect major happy ending, nor peaks of fame for Manju. I did not mind this, because by that time I was immersed into the symbolism of Manju's actions, understanding finally his deep need for loneliness, stemming from the struggle between loving his dad, loving another boy and loving himself enough to follow his own secret passion

In order to properly grasp the idea of this novel, one should remove all expectations prior to reading it, avoid judgment and be prepared for unusual things to be said and done eventually.

Thanks to Netgalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Protagonist Manju struggles with familial & societal expectations regarding a possible cricket career (a way out of the slum) and heterosexuality. He longs to go to college but he also longs to play cricket. He smashes against his abusive father's expectations, his rebellious older brother, and his-love hate relationship with a privileged young man he desires. Homophobia runs through the book and remains unaddressed; the characters don't grow.

Although I did enjoy a lot about this book, including the relationship between the two brothers and their horrible, domineering father, there was a bit too much cricket for me!

Selection Day is the story of Radha and Manju, two boys who are being moulded for cricket stardom by their father. He has brought them from his village to the slums of Mumbai to give them the opportunity. He is controlling, eccentric and ruthlessly determined. The boys, as children, have no choice but to do what he wants.

Although the story follows both brothers, it mainly focuses on the younger, Manju. Manju is a talented cricketer but he really wants to be a scientist. His father is so convinced that both he and Radha will succeed that he wants him to give up his education. Then Manju notices Javed, a handsome, privileged and determinedly unconventional cricketer who is also their rival. Manju’s attraction to Javed further confuses his sense of what he wants and what is right.

I found Selection Day a little slow going at first. I thought it was just another coming-of-age story. But as the boys grow older, and the decisive day approaches, it becomes about much more.

The talent scout and coach Tommy Sir is a historian of cricket, but also a man of wide-ranging interests, from military history to geology. He sees the changes in cricket representing a shift in his country’s values. He laments the power of money and fame.

Javed’s affluence means he is free to rebel in ways which Radha and Manju are not. Their father takes on a sponsorship arrangement which leaves them in virtually slavery, prey to corruption. But each brother attempts to assert himself in a different way, and much of the story is about how they respond to the increasing pressures placed upon them.

Selection Day is a vivid portrait of Mumbai, cricket, obsession and ambition. It is about belonging and competing and the cost of both.

Scribner and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of Selection Day. This is my honest opinion of the book.

Manjunath Kumar and his brother Radha live in the slums of Mumbai with a father obsessed with them becoming cricket stars. Tommy Sir, an old cricket scout, would be the perfect person to help them, if only their father would get out of the way.

Selection Day is Manju's coming of age story, as he is pulled in many different directions in an attempt to figure out what his path might actually be. Personally, this book was all over the place for me. The author never allows the reader to gain a foothold, to really form a connection with the main characters. In the end, I really did not know who Manju or Radha were. The setting, an environment just begging for strong description, really never materialized. Selection Day was a missed opportunity by the author to bring readers into a time and place that they may not have been privy to previously.

I unfortunately do not recommend this title. Adiga is known mostly for his book The White Tiger, which won the Man Booker Prize. I am not familiar with the rest of his work, but this book definitely fell flat for me. I was interested to pick this up as I do not known much about cricket, India's most popular game. However as I kept reading, I discovered that the book not only suffers from really disjointed dialogue, prose, and plot, but there is also rampant sexism, homophobia, classism, and racism in this book that largely goes unchallenged. While I don't think these are the personal viewpoints of the author, writing very insensitive jokes that go unchallenged in a book like this can be insulting or flat-out harmful for the readers that fall within these identities. A joke that particularly stands out to me is one of the characters calling something the "real KKK, or Kondom, Kondom, Kondom." This kind of joke is incredibly insensitive and inappropriate. If these jokes had gone challenged within the book, either by narration, inner monologue by the characters, or overt challenge by one of the characters within the dialogue itself, this might be a very different review.

The Gentleman's Game...

Two brothers are being groomed by their father to become the greatest cricketers in India. Radha, the elder, with his film-star looks and love of the game, is the better of the two, and it's accepted that he will be the star. But as they grow up, Radha's skill diminishes, just a little, but enough for him to be eclipsed by the younger Manju, whose attitude to the game is more ambivalent. Their mother having disappeared when they were little (run away? dead? The boys aren't sure), the brothers have been brought up by their tyrannical father Mohan, who is determined they will succeed in the sport as a way to raise the family out of the slums. So when the chance of sponsorship comes along, Mohan grabs it, even though it's at best an unethical deal which sells his sons into a kind of bondage and, at worst, borders on the illegal.

This is a story of sibling rivalry, tied in with a wider picture of corruption in society shown through the corruption in cricket. The game, once the preserve of all that was considered gentlemanly, has become all about money. The days of languorous five-day test matches has morphed into not only one-day cricket, but the hideousness of the ultra-short 20-20, which Adiga describes in his humorous glossary of cricketing terms at the end of the book as “in the eyes of some older fans, almost as bad as baseball.” It's not necessary, I think, to know about cricket to enjoy the book - Adiga doesn't fall into the trap of lengthy descriptions of games, tactics or technicalities, and the sport could as easily be any other. But cricket has a particular resonance, because of its origin as a game of the British Empire, a period whose influence is still vital in understanding much of Indian society.

As Manju hits adolescence, he becomes fascinated by another young player, Javed. Javed is gay and Manju's attraction to him suggests that he is too. But Manju is of a lower class than Javed and has a father who's not likely to be the most supportive, so it would take considerably more courage for him to admit his feelings than Javed. But his relationship with Javed isn't purely about physical attraction – Manju finds himself influenced by the older, more confident boy in other ways. Javed, another talented cricketer, sees the corruption in the sport and wants Manju to give it up. So poor Manju has a jealous brother who feels he deserves to be the best, a friend pulling him away from cricket, and his father and his coach putting pressure on him to practice every moment he can. It's not altogether surprising that he's confused before he gets to Selection Day, the day on which the big teams pick which young players they will sign.

I love Adiga's depiction of Mumbai or Bombay (names which he uses interchangeably). He shows the poverty, corruption and class divisions quite clearly but, unlike some of the (usually ex-pat) Indian writers who love to wallow exclusively in the misery, Adiga also shows the other side – the vibrancy, the struggle for social mobility, the advances of recent years. His characters, even when they're being put through the emotional wringer, manage to have some fun along the way, and the whole atmosphere he portrays lacks the irredeemable hopelessness of so much Indian literature. There's also a good deal of humour, often very perceptive and coming at unexpected moments, startling me into laughter. This book tackles some tough subjects, but on the whole Adiga simply lays the arguments out and leaves the reader to come to her own conclusions – there's no whiff of the polemical in his writing.

There is, however, some great characterisation, and he writes about them empathetically so that it's hard not to see why even the less savoury characters have turned out as they have. One of the things I loved was seeing how the perception of Mohan, the boys' father, changed as they grew up. This man who loomed over them in childhood shrinks as they grow – both physically and in terms of his influence. It's the mark of the quality of Adiga's writing that this happens so gradually there's no jarring moment, but towards the end I realised I had come to feel about him quite differently than I had in the beginning.

For me, this was a slow-burn book. It took at least a third of the book before I was convinced that this tale of cricketing brothers was going to hold my interest. But as it progressed, I began to appreciate the subtlety with which Adiga was showing various aspects of contemporary Indian life, and as always I found his writing pure pleasure to read. And by the time I reached the end, I found he had again created some characters who had become real to me, in the way Masterji did in his excellent Last Man in Tower. This book confirms Adiga's place as one of my favourite authors, and gets my wholehearted recommendation.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Scribner.

This book isn't for everyone, but I think it'd be a fabulous book to have in the classroom. Students will learn how similar competitiveness, yet, how vital it can be for some in other countries.

Selection Day is a coming-of-age story about two talented young brothers, Radha and Manju Kumar, as they train to become professional cricket players. Living in the slums of India with their legit crazy and domineering father, they are desperate to get out. Their cricket skills eventually get noticed by scouters--and then by a rich businessman who offers to sponsor them if they agree to train with a renowned coach (in the hopes that at least one of them will be selected to play on a professional team).

With a little extra cash from the sponsor, life gets better for the family. Their father finally moves them out of the ghetto, and they all begin to live a more middle class lifestyle. But things also get...complicated. Their father gets crazier. The boys's relationship with each other gets extremely competitive and destructive. Plus, the brothers begin to forge new friendships with others that make them question their devotion to their father, cricket, and each other. In the end, they are forced to decide which relationships are worth fighting for--and if they even want to play cricket at all.

This is a weird book, not gonna lie. I've never read anything else by Aravind Adiga, but my understanding is that all of his books are like this: crazy characters, hard to follow dialogue, and confusing storytelling. Reading this book is definitely an "experience," but it's an experience you kind of just have to let happen to you. I struggled to get through those first 100 pages, and only once I stopped obsessing about actually understanding what was going on did I begin to like the book.

Despite my struggle reading it, I probably would have still given the book four stars, but the ending was so disappointing. I don't know if Adiga was intentionally trying to make this a "road-less-traveled cautionary tale" or something, but it fell so, so flat. I could not have been more disappointed with where the story ended up.

So three stars it is, and no, I won't read another one by Adiga--Booker Prize winner or not.

For about a hundred-fifty years—a little before 1800 to the middle of the twentieth century—the British Empire militarily got the drop on most of India, and while they systematically looted it while the looting was good, India, as had been its very long habit, absorbed what it liked of English culture and language, and discarded the rest.

One of the things it absorbed was the sport cricket.

This novel’s elevator pitch is: poor Indian father is obsessed with making his two sons into cricket stars. But that’s like saying that War and Peace is about ballroom dancing and Borodino.

Put it this way. Out of all the billions of people on earth right now, it would be difficult to find anyone less interested in any kind of team sports than I. Yet I found this novel absorbing, vivid, often rough and painful, in spite of the cricket.

Sports-obsessive parent-zillas are well known in America. Indian’s version, according to author Aravind Adiga, share some of the same traits, including what under pretty much any other context would be rampant child abuse.

Radha and Manju are the two sons. The father has followed his own crackpot philosophy in raising them, then negotiates hard to in effect sell them, with a mind to commercials and merchandizing.

With such lines as “Revenge is the capitalism of the poor,” and “[Anand Mehta talked superman to superman with Mohan Kumar, suffering the others, mere humans, to stand around them eavesdropping,” Adiga offers pitiless insights into human nature that we all share, while illustrating with vividness the details of life of rich, middle class, and poor in India—among its varieties of languages and cultures. Dramatic tension, for me, rises between what I recognize as universals (not always admirable—far from it) and fascinating differences.

And because this is not American sports drama, which tends to have one ending, you really don’t know where it’s going as you watch the group madness of sports do its best to consume these two—and what eventually happens.

By VICKI ROCK
“Selection Day” by Aravind Adiga, Scribner, 320 pages, $26.
This is set in Mumbai, India. Mohan Kumar becomes obsessed with his sons, Radha and Manju, becoming successful cricket players.
His wife leaves him which makes him more determined to make his sons successful cricket players.
While he is really focusing on his older son, Radha, his younger son, Manju is the better player. But Manju is more interested in science. The boys are terrified by their father, who is trying to push them into a better life. The coach is called Tommy Sir, who introduces them to Anand Mehta, a rich stockbroker. Mehta purchases the right to one-third of boys earning for the life in return for helping support the family.
The writing is very good, and funny in places, and the view of life in India is fascinating. The problem is the lengthy parts about cricket slows the story down.

India is obsessed with cricket, and that obsession is made so vivid in this compelling book about two brothers from India’s slums: Manju and Radha. They are both cricket prodigies, and the game offers them – and their domineering, abusive father – a way out of poverty, and also a chance to emulate their idol, the great Sachin Tendulkar.
To become great at cricket requires single-minded, total focus. While Radha’s world contains only cricket, Manju has other interests as well. Manju is an intelligent and diligent scholar with a particular interest in science – especially CSI forensic science. At first it is not a problem, as he is only the second-best cricketer in the family. But very soon he overtakes his older brother. Manju could do anything with his life, but his father, the chief cricket scout Tommy Sir, the entrepreneur Anand Mehta and Radha, insist that he concentrates only on cricket – increasingly so, as their futures come to depend on his.
The book concentrates on Manju and his choices: cricket or education; gay or straight; family or friend; freedom and ostracism or fame and riches. His future could be straightforward and assured, but is he ready to accept what others have meticulously planned for him?
Personally, I found the older brother Radha slightly more interesting. He had few choices in life, and had to continually deal with his younger brother bettering him, having grown up being told that he was the golden one. His anger at the perceived injustice only comes out once – but in such a tragic and life changing way. What can you do when all your dreams are shattered by a single missed ball?
This book is a wonderful portrayal of a narrow but important aspect of Indian life. It deals with family relationships and the all-powerful influence of sport and social norms in the maturation process of young boys. Throughout the story, cricket is king. But even if you don’t have an interest in the game, the story is so well written, that the context tells you everything you need to know. If cricket is your game, then you are in for a real treat.

I just could not connect with the characters in this book. I read a little over 20% of the novel, then gave up.