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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel follows several elderly British people as they relocate from a rapidly changing Britain to a retirement home in Bangalore, India. While the Marigold's residents may seem stuck in their nostalgia for an earlier age, living in India allows them as well as their families and loved ones to better understand their place in the modern world and for some, find happiness.

While I was expecting this book to be somewhat cheesy but inspirational, the tone was actually very dry and sarcastic. About 200 pages in, I found myself thinking things like; "these people really aren't very happy" and "are there any working marriages in this book?" Another surprise for me was that this book isn't really about India so much as it's about England. India was a neutral setting that wasn't particularly shown as good or bad except in the context of its relationship with the 'developed' world. England, on the other hand was portrayed as a pretty dreary place, full of traffic, crime, and those gosh-darned kids.

I did quite enjoy this one and would recommend it to others but I would warn them that the blurb on the back of the book (and the movie trailer) don't really give a very accurate feeling of its tone. It had a lot of good characters who were flawed but relatable and it didn't fall into the typical first-world-people-in-the-third-world cliches, which was very nice. My main gripe with it was that there seemed to be quite a few coincidences...

In the end, I don't totally know quite how I felt about this book. I liked it and there seems to be a lot to be said about the themes of globalization and modernization, but somehow I have a hard time figuring it out.