Our late summer reading choice is "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" here is what the NY Times had to say about this powerful story...
Katherine Boo writes in “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” her exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter.
Half an acre. 335 huts. 3,000 people. And a concrete wall that is supposed to hide them from view: this is Annawadi, the Mumbai slum that comes vibrantly to life in this book’s pages. Ms. Boo says that she chose Annawadi because the scale of this “sumpy plug of slum” bordering a lake of sewage was small, and its location was fraught with possibilities. Annawadi sits beside the road to the Mumbai airport, on “a stretch where new India and old India collided and made new India late.” In 2008, at the time the events in the book unfolded, scavenging and trash sorting were the children of Annawadi’s most promising career choices.
Without condescending to her subjects in the slightest, Ms. Boo explains that dreams of upward mobility are just barely possible in Annawadi. And Zehrunisa’s family has set out to renovate the kitchen of the hut in which they live. The book takes its peculiar title from sunshine-yellow ads for ceramic tile that are painted on the concrete wall that hides Annawadi: the ad series repeats the words “Beautiful” and “Forever.” Behind those “beautiful forevers,” Zehrunisa wants some of that tile for her own.
The book’s cover, with an image of abject squalor, does not do justice to its agile prose, wry tone and surprisingly upbeat theatrics. Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted.