Opinion

I think that Midnight's Children is an interesting book. I was quite surprised by the long exposition describing Saleem's family. Starting off with Aziz's struggle with religion and then his conflict with his wife before the book continues on with Saleem's mother. She forced herself to love her husband and then she worried about the prophecy about Saleem. Rushdie uses a lot of descriptions and imagery to help the reader image the story and make it seem like Saleem is directly telling the story to the reader. I loved the little comments that Saleem makes about various things that makes the story seem that much more like Saleem is directly telling the story. Throughout the long beginning Rushdie puts in a lot of foreshadowing elements such as Saleem's prophecy. Rushdie also switches a lot to short scenes between Padma and Saleem that help characterize Saleem and Padma and remind the reader to keep thinking about the effects of Saleem's family on Saleem. Since the point of the beginning is to help the reader understand Saleem better and understand more about the conflicts of India. This book is very unique and though it is interesting, I have to say that it is only okay and not great. I was expecting a story about a guy who had superpowers and not a story about that guy's family beforehand, but it was still interesting to learn about Saleem's family.