A surgeon is about to close up his dilapidated clinic in an Indian village when three dead strangers appear. They beg to have their wounds healed up before dawn, at which point, they’ll have a new chance at life if all goes well.

Um. What? It was an interesting premise. The book description goes on to say that after helping the dead, the surgeon’s life gets all tangled up with theirs and some other stuff that actually has nothing to do with the story at all. Ninety percent of the book is the night in question, with details about how the surgeon tries to tend the lifeless wounds with near-worthless equipment in this run down clinic, mixed with the surgeon’s bitterness about his life and the dead folks’ stories about the afterlife and the bargain that brought them back.

This should have been interesting.

Y’all. I was both bored out of my head, and continuously confused. Like, I couldn’t even figure out what genre this was supposed to be. Just plain fiction? Allegory? Fantasy? Magical realism? I also kept trying to figure out what the author was trying to say with this book, and…well, I’ve got nothing. Maybe it went over my head. Or maybe the book missed the mark. I don’t know. Mostly I just regret the time I spent reading it. Once again, I told myself multiple times to abandon, and didn’t listen to myself, so I got what I deserve.

But don’t take it from me. Looking through reviews online, people love this book. I found it weird and pointless and boring, but everyone else seems to find it profound and inspirational.