The book is divided into three sections, each focusing on one member of the Dorai family. The first book is about Soloman, his attempts to halt the outbreak of caste wars, and his loss of power in the face of a changing India. The second book looks at Daniel, Soloman’s peace loving son, who becomes a famous doctor following in the footsteps of his mentor Dr Pillai, and inventor of Moonwhite Thylam: “make your face shine like the Pongal moon”. There is also Aaron, the angry freedom fighter, and his struggles for India’s independence. The third book, Pulimed, focuses on Daniel’s son Kannan, who falls in love with an Anglo Indian Helen at University in Madras. When his father doesn’t approve of Helen, Kannan leaves his home to become a plantation manager on the tea estates in Pulamed. The men are reasonably well drawn, and Soloman’s physical strength, and attempts to moderate between his traditional role, and the changes taking place around him drive the plot forward, as does Aaron’s anger and pain, which colour his political focus, and make Daniel’s focus on family and internal matters seem more realistic than the flimsy and shifting ethics of the political world into which Daniel refuses to be drawn. Kannan’s attempts to fit into British society, partly a product of his father’s political apathy, and his struggles for self-actualisation in the face of his wife’s unhappiness and British “superiority” are reasonably poignant. Charity is also reasonable interesting as a character, trying to maintain her sense of decorum and pride in a country that dramatically devalues her sex. Her descent into insanity is at least as powerful as Aaron’s pain and role as a political assassin. Wasn't it odd, he mused, that in the midst of death our thoughts turn so persistently to the future." On the beach, Alice plays fetch with Helen's dogs, while Helen and T.D. play cards. Alice wonders if Truman thinks he won't like ice cream because something "weird" happened to him, like a bug coming out of his ice cream when he was a baby. Then, at school, Alice gives her report on Italy, but adds in a jab at Truman by saying that you wouldn't know how great gelato tastes if you're "prejudiced" against ice cream. In a world irrevocably shaken by historical events, most of his characters remain curiously unscathed. Too entangled in their own familial disputes to notice the world around them changing, the characters come across as superfluous, ignorant and entirely self-centered. For example, while Gandhi is busy becoming a household name, Daniel embarks on a ridiculous expedition to taste every mango in India for the sole purpose of confirming his opinion that Chevathar's fabled blue variety are indeed, as he suspects, the best in the land. Only Aaron, Daniel's brother, is swept up in the tide of history. He joins the struggle for freedom with catastrophic results. The blue mango can be your ideal fruit tree: an ornamental tree that produces delicious, and attractive, mangoes. And growing one (or more) makes you part of its ex-situ conservation!

Blue mango’s new foliage is bright red, like that of so many tropical plants (an interesting story in its own right), always eye-catching against the deep green, strappy, classically tropical foliage of the mango. It’s known to be resistant to anthracnose, and loves our wet sub-tropical climate. The fruit may be small compared to other mangoes, but hey, it’s blue! A wonderful epic that centres all around the Dorai family's adventures and lives and is finally brought full circle in an exciting climax involving Kanaan. If you ever find yourself confused in writing the plural of mango, you aren’t alone. The spelling issue can cause pause because conflicting guidelines are at play.Doraipuram. The only character I really liked was Aaron. The accidental Freedom Fighter. Daniel wasn’t a well chalked out character. I couldn’t place what exactly he was or what he wanted to be. Did he want to be the thalaivar or not? Was Doraipuram his dream or his ego trip? It seemed very contrived, the way the settlement was built and populated. Characters just popped in and out without giving you the opportunity to actually know them. That gossiping woman who had an entire chapter dedicated to her, I read the book two days ago but seem to have forgotten her name already. Such forgettable pieces of characters. Set in a village in the erstwhile Madras Presidency, this is a story of three generations of a family. You simply must try it, it's so soft and so cheesy" "Please stop talking. You're making me queasy." Despite the flaws in character development, Davidar's prose, for the most part, flows at a rapid, fluid clip. At times, however, his usually lyrical writing plods along at a most cumbersome pace --- a tiresomely detailed description of how to brew tea immediately comes to mind. But the author eloquently conveys the raw beauty and power of the Indian landscape, and the cycle of the seasons and day turning into night provide a sense of the wheel turning and the steady progression of time. For centuries, maybe millennia, mangoes have been cultivated by humans to encourage the qualities we value: less fiber, greater and sweeter flesh, smaller seed, and in more recent times, longer shelf life so we can ship mangoes to our friends up north and have them last. But at any rate, the varieties we have now mostly still fall under the same species: Mangifera indica.

At the moment of his triumph, he had escaped the world, the hundreds of little things we say and do to ourselves to bind us down, make us helpless little worms, who on their deathbeds only remember and lament what they always wanted to do, but never had the courage for." What I really liked about the writing was that there was little exposition and explanation. For example, Davidar does not explicitly the reader things like the fact that a wedding thaali comes from Hindu practices but is used by Tamil Christians as well. He also does not point out to the way people are named from both the Bible and Hindu scripture: Apart from Solomon, Daniel and Aaron, there is Ramadoss (meaning one who serves Ram) or Kannan (the diminutive associated with Krishna). Davidar doesn't try to explain how India functions and that is the best thing about the book. If the reader is as clueless as the beleaguered British - portrayed with both sympathy and simmering anger in the book - the author doesn't seem to mind.Sometimes with English, even when we think we know how to use and spell a word correctly, different forms of it can spring up and trip us. An Aesop: In-Universe, Helen and T.D. give the Blue Mangoes story a moral about how friends don't have to like the same things. The planter isn't expected to be a man of culture shall we say?; 'Yes, I know, Major Stevenson asked me whether I read a lot, when he interviewed me. I said no, and he said, good, very good, planters are expected to get their boots dirty, not lounge around reading books." The Good Book was right: a man must leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife . . . for she will do him good and not evil all the days of her life." I could have forgiven some of the clunky writing and wild leaps of plot if I had cared at all about any of the characters. None of the three main characters is remotely likeable or interesting. "Unlikeable" I could forgive, but I never had the sense that the author really understood his characters' motivations, either. Stuff happens to them, and they have big revelations, but none of it is tied into anything we've been shown or understood about these characters. The bad guys are bad, bad, bad (particularly the Anglo-Indian hussy in the final section of the novel), the good guys are pretty bad too although the author seems to think they are just well-rounded, and overall, by the end I was just rooting for the tiger.

It is the end of the 19th century and headman Solomon Dorai of the village of Chevathar in Southern India is desperately fighting against a world that is changing and to hold the remaining members of his family together and for them to uphold the traditional ways of their lifestyle but against the political and social unrest at this period this is nigh on impossible. I was taken in by the cover. And guess who went out and bought/planted a mango tree? No, TWO mango trees! Yeah. I am a dangerous reader. This species and many other mango tree varieties will be available at Fairchild’s Mango Festival, July 13 and 14. See more information at fairchildgarden.org/mango Artistic License – Space: In Blue Mangoes, the mangoes come from the moon, even though there are no plants on the mood in reality. Blue Mangoes is a story featured in Ice Scream and Milo's Reading Buddy. It focuses on a birdlike creature called Gangoose McGee trying to get another birdlike character called Nicholas Mellow to eat blue mangoes.When Daniel encountered it, he was overwhelmed by its qualities — the pale green skin, the orange-yellow flesh and above all the taste: a distinctive sweetness balanced by a slight tartness. Strange Minds Think Alike: Despite having opposing views, both Alice and Truman manage to end up saying, "It's not the ice cream; it's the principle of the thing." Shout-Out: Blue Mangoes is a parody of Green Eggs and Ham, with its weird art style, rhyming narration, and plot of one creature insisting that another eat some weird food. For once, he wished he was the young boy he had once been - before responsibility had descended upon him, along with self-consciousness, restraint, and a sense of his own inadequacy."