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thebookerharlot's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
emii_k's review
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
jadadakotawilliams's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
tara_s_nu's review against another edition
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
nini23's review against another edition
emotional
informative
tense
4.5
I was attracted to Earthspinner by the pottery and mythic horse. We kick off the story following Sarayu/Sara at a university in England feeling homesick and spending time at the university pottery studio. This brings back reminiscences of her pottery teacher Elango in Andhra Pradesh, India when she was a tween. Elango comes from a family of potters; the area of the neighbourhood he lives in called Kummarapet derives its name from potters in Telugu (Kummara) where pottery is an ancestral vocation and caste.
Elango dreams of making a terracotta clay horse, the kind his ancestors used to make, a central feature of a Hindu festival at the temple. He wishes to gift it to his love, Zohra, whom he has a clandestine relationship with because interfaith relationships would not be tolerated. The timeline of the book is in late 1970s, after Emergency with Morarji Desai being Prime Minister.
As an amateur pottery dabbler myself, I enjoyed the descriptions of pottery making. The mythology of the terracotta horse is fascinating, especially the part in relation to placing Lord Shiva's fires into the mare and putting it into the ocean, where it still walks the ocean floor (myth of the submerged mare). Elango asks Zohra's blind grandfather, a renowned calligrapher, to carve some Urdu words onto the horse and the poem he chooses is just breathtaking. I loved all the poetry in this book.
Hate and intolerance crescendos into mob violence where no one is left unscathed. Later, Sara loses her father to cardiac disease and leaves India for university studies. She befriends a Malaysian Chinese Karin Wang at the university pottery studio. The sense I get is of these young ladies trying out their newfound freedom and possibilities while still wrestling with the strictures of their home countries.
All in all, Earthspinner evoked wonder in me. I loved the geology talks by Sara's father
But his voice seeped into us, and his oddly soothing discourses on plate tectonics, much of which we did not understand, collected in me and Tia and shaped us in the way limestone forms unnoticed in warm and calm seawater from sediments of shells and algae that remain in it as fossils. We would fall asleep to the sounds of plates diverging, converging, sliding past each other, in the process causing new mountains to rise, oceans to churn, and continents to form or rupture.
My father would have said change was the work of the earth spinning, spinning as it always had.
Elango dreams of making a terracotta clay horse, the kind his ancestors used to make, a central feature of a Hindu festival at the temple. He wishes to gift it to his love, Zohra, whom he has a clandestine relationship with because interfaith relationships would not be tolerated. The timeline of the book is in late 1970s, after Emergency with Morarji Desai being Prime Minister.
As an amateur pottery dabbler myself, I enjoyed the descriptions of pottery making. The mythology of the terracotta horse is fascinating, especially the part in relation to placing Lord Shiva's fires into the mare and putting it into the ocean, where it still walks the ocean floor (myth of the submerged mare). Elango asks Zohra's blind grandfather, a renowned calligrapher, to carve some Urdu words onto the horse and the poem he chooses is just breathtaking. I loved all the poetry in this book.
Hate and intolerance crescendos into mob violence where no one is left unscathed. Later, Sara loses her father to cardiac disease and leaves India for university studies. She befriends a Malaysian Chinese Karin Wang at the university pottery studio. The sense I get is of these young ladies trying out their newfound freedom and possibilities while still wrestling with the strictures of their home countries.
All in all, Earthspinner evoked wonder in me. I loved the geology talks by Sara's father
But his voice seeped into us, and his oddly soothing discourses on plate tectonics, much of which we did not understand, collected in me and Tia and shaped us in the way limestone forms unnoticed in warm and calm seawater from sediments of shells and algae that remain in it as fossils. We would fall asleep to the sounds of plates diverging, converging, sliding past each other, in the process causing new mountains to rise, oceans to churn, and continents to form or rupture.
My father would have said change was the work of the earth spinning, spinning as it always had.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism and Religious bigotry
shahiabassh69's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
apurvanagpal's review against another edition
The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy is as beautiful in its prose as it is on the outside, an array of colours and fire in just the right places to highlight the magnificent contours of the terracotta horse, around which the novel loosely revolves.
We meet Sara through journal entries of her empty days in England, longing for home and her recently deceased father. Sitting in a pottery studio, she recounts about her passion for the craft she learnt through Elango, an autorickshaw driver by the day who used to ferry her and her sister to and from school, but a potter by heart, who taught her the patient art of working with earth and clay in his shed near a Moringa Tree.
As she confronts the bitter sweet memories of her past, she thinks of Elango and his dream of a burning terracotta horse under water, Chinna, the dog Elango mysteriously finds in the forest (or was it the other way round?) who is instantly loved by all. She thinks of where things went wrong, was it when Elango fell in love with Zohra, a girl from another religion or was it ‘Akka’, who knowingly spewed hate on grounds of religion and jealousy, spreading faster than the fire that transforms the soft clay to its hardened form.
I loved the writing and how it holds the several themes together; longing, home, superstition, religion and a deep longing for the craft. Roy’s writing has an incredible charm that pulls you in as it pulls the reigns of her characters and the passion that drives them, be it love or a search for themselves.
Another thing that stood out for me is how these different stories develop independently of each other, even though one sets the other in motion and I thought it was wonderfully done.
My only qualm with the book was that it left more loose ends in terms of completion, that frayed into existence like a letter that ends abruptly and left me wanting for more when I flipped the last page.
But I really liked it and recommend it for Roy’s writing, her incredible craft of writing about ordinary moments with a beautiful ease and the memorable characters that leave their mark on us!
We meet Sara through journal entries of her empty days in England, longing for home and her recently deceased father. Sitting in a pottery studio, she recounts about her passion for the craft she learnt through Elango, an autorickshaw driver by the day who used to ferry her and her sister to and from school, but a potter by heart, who taught her the patient art of working with earth and clay in his shed near a Moringa Tree.
As she confronts the bitter sweet memories of her past, she thinks of Elango and his dream of a burning terracotta horse under water, Chinna, the dog Elango mysteriously finds in the forest (or was it the other way round?) who is instantly loved by all. She thinks of where things went wrong, was it when Elango fell in love with Zohra, a girl from another religion or was it ‘Akka’, who knowingly spewed hate on grounds of religion and jealousy, spreading faster than the fire that transforms the soft clay to its hardened form.
I loved the writing and how it holds the several themes together; longing, home, superstition, religion and a deep longing for the craft. Roy’s writing has an incredible charm that pulls you in as it pulls the reigns of her characters and the passion that drives them, be it love or a search for themselves.
Another thing that stood out for me is how these different stories develop independently of each other, even though one sets the other in motion and I thought it was wonderfully done.
My only qualm with the book was that it left more loose ends in terms of completion, that frayed into existence like a letter that ends abruptly and left me wanting for more when I flipped the last page.
But I really liked it and recommend it for Roy’s writing, her incredible craft of writing about ordinary moments with a beautiful ease and the memorable characters that leave their mark on us!