What am I and what am I capable of? In the asking comes revelations on the nature of love, power in friendship, weight of dogma, and the visceral seeping together of diverse cultures. It delivers everything I didn’t know I desperately wanted: snake bites, ink baths, god-energy, gurus, post-punk music, viral videos, redemption, and an unforgettable character asking all the big questions. “This marvelous novel offers up the most extraordinary circumstance in which to live a life. Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things Sindu is a phenomenal writer and Blue-Skinned Gods is a treasure.” The prose is lush and stunning, the narrative wildly gripping. It is a true joy to encounter a book so beautifully written. I was enraptured by the careful twining of these lives: a manipulative father, a mother who loves her son to the point of agony, the joy and despair of tender first love, the pressure of knowing your destiny and the devastation of losing everything at once. Sindu has created a cast of characters so compelling it was difficult to set the book down. “ Blue-Skinned Gods is a marvel of a novel. Brandon Hobson, author of Where the Dead Sit Talking and The Removed
A coming-of-age story wielding philosophical, historical, and emotional moments full of passion, vividly described, Blue-Skinned Gods is one of the most original and beautiful novels I’ve read in a long time.” “Sj Sindu has given us a true gift in Kalki Sami and his journey. The richness of this story will take hold of you and never let go.”
Here is a novel about the bonds between brothers, a deceptive tyrant and son, a mother who doesn’t know how to save herself or her child, a boy and how he yearns for his young loves, and so much more.
This time, she tells the story of a boy with blue skin who is trying to be the god everyone tells him he is. “SJ Sindu has written another brilliant novel in Blue-Skinned Gods. These witty episodes allow Kalki to try to define himself as well as to understand the world around him.”
Here Sindu is at her inventive best, with wild juxtapositions of people and situations, from a post-punk band that takes in Kalki, to hipsters of various gender identities who try to seduce him, to new-age worshipers who refuse to believe he is not a healer, to gangsters who want to bring him back to the ashram. “SJ Sindu has imagined a fascinating premise for her novel exploring identity, family, community and the tensions that arise among them. Although the ending is climactic and jarring, it provides both resolve and clarity.” Conflicts abound in the novel, but Sindu reveals which one held the most weight in the final sentence. On a linear timeline, Blue-Skinned Gods doesn’t end at the end the end is tucked somewhere near the beginning. Every oddity has an explanation, and societal issues left unaddressed in childhood come back around for an older, wiser Kalki to consider. “Sindu’s applied cultural knowledge and careful character-building makes each surprise believable without being predictable. In attending to the fine aftershocks of this loss and many others to come, Sindu masterfully renders how our environments bake into our skin.” It is impossible not to be hypnotized by the tenderness of these opening scenes. But relatively early in the novel Kalki, narrating in adulthood as a university lecturer in Toronto, breaks the illusion of his own divinity - and any illusion that his childhood had been blessed. Raised to believe he is the '10th incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu,' he heals the sick at his family’s ashram in Tamil Nadu, India. “Kalki’s life as a blue-skinned child deity at first seems rather romantic. Shortlisted for the 2022 Lammy Award in Bisexual FictionĪn Autostraddle Best Queer Book of the Year Traveling from India to the underground rock scene of New York City, Blue-Skinned Gods explores ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, and spans continents and faiths, in an expansive and heartfelt look at the need for belief in our globally interconnected world. Over the next decade, his family unravels, and every relationship he relied on-father, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin-starts falling apart.
While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity. In Kalki’s tenth year, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the tenth human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.
In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. From the award-winning author of Marriage of a Thousand Lies comes a brilliantly written, globe-spanning novel about identity, faith, family, and sexuality.