From the dust jacket: “Ram Mohammad Thomas has been arrested.  Because how can a poor orphan, who has never read a newspaper or gone to school, correctly answer all twelve questions on the television game show Who Will Win a Billion?—unless he has cheated?  As the story unfolds, Ram explains to his lawyer how he knew the answer to each question by telling a chapter of his amazing life—from the day he was salvaged from a dustbin to his meeting with a security-crazed Australian army colonel while performing as an overly creative tour guide at the Taj Mahal.  Stunning a television audience of millions, Ram draws on a store of street wisdom and accidental encounters that provides him with the essential keys not only to the quiz show but also to life itself.”

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You know those people who continually tell you that the book is SO much better than the movie, and that you just have to read the book because the movie left so much out?  Well, they’re right!  I always read the book first, before seeing the movie, but in this case, I did it backwards because… I didn’t know there was a book!  Forgive my ignorance… I’m going to blame it on the fact that the novel used to have a different name, Q and A, prior to the movie rendition coming out… sad to say the editors were right; Swarup will sell more books under the new title, but they got the title WRONG!!!  More on that later.

So, Slumdog Millionaire the book, versus Slumdog Millionaire the movie… no contest!  The book wins!  THEY AREN’T EVEN THE SAME STORY!  Yep, imagine my surprise!  I actually put off reading this book because the movie was really depressing for me, and I didn’t want to read about a girl forced into sexual servitude, or brothers feuding to the point of death… that stuff is too morbid for me.  But, I should have known!  I’ve seen enough books-turned-movies to know that Hollywood changes things all the time; it’s their artistic license, something my 9^th graders are learning in our film studies unit right now. 

The only aspect of the book that was the same as the movie was the idea that an eighteen-year-old Indian orphan was arrested for winning the grand prize on the game show.  Okay, so a few of the stories, perhaps two, make it into the movie, but that’s the end of the similarities.  The names are different, the grand prize amount is different, the love story is different, the trials and tribulations of the main character are different… it’s just a completely different story, and I must say, I PREFER THE BOOK.  It’s much happier, for one thing.  While life as an orphan on the street is a terrible thing, Swarup focuses on the good things in the main character’s life (Ram), while the movie focuses on the morbid… and the REAL reason Ram went on the game show will blow you away.  When I got to the final question in the book, it ALL made sense.  It’s been a long time since I’ve read a novel that is successfully able to move backwards and forwards throughout a story AND tie it all together in the end.  Swarup did a phenomenal job with this book, and I agree with him that the name of his book should have remained  Q and A, but once again, producers and editors “change” things through artistic license, and now Swarup’s book is only known through the movie title.  Of course it will sell more with the same name as the movie, but the title DOESN’T do it justice… hello, Ram won a BILLION! 

Five stars for the novel!  

Two stars for the movie: