SOURCE: A review of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, in Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1998, pp. 354-55.

[The following is a favorable review of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.]

This enchanting first novel [Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard], set in the Indian village of Shakhot, details the agreeable chaos that ensues from its underachieving protagonist's decision to abandon the workaday world and live in a tree.

That protagonist is Sampath Chawla, a child born during an insufferably hot summer (when "The bees flew drunk on nectar that had turned alcoholic") at the precise moment that a Red Cross plane delivering supplies to "famine camps" inadvertently showered its bounty on grateful Shakhot. This wry allusion to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is only one of numerous grace notes in a beguiling narrative that displays its character's eccentricities abundantly while never reducing them to caricatures. Sampath, at 20 having become a morose failure as...