Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: worthy subject matter, unworthy writing

This book had been sitting on my shelf for sometime before I had the chance to read it. Having finished, I don't regret putting it off. I was very interested in the setting and subject matter of the novel, but found that even as I turned the final pages, I had still not grown to care about any of the characters. Not only did the characters seem flat but were without an intersesting arch-- the cook's son Biju was the one slight exception for me, though his story was unsatisfactorily resolved.I found the writing beautiful in places and messy in others. Yet even the beautiful pieces seemed more like exercises in floridity, than truly artful description. In any case even the most lovely sentence cannot make make the banal extraordinary, though the book seemed like a 350+ page hard fought attempt to do so.I wanted to like this book, and I wish that I had, but it was choppy and uninteresting. Not, I think, worthy of such a high prize.