Instead of a review, I'm just posting a comment I made on a writer's blog, who advanced the idea that Kipling's book was inherently racist. Pretty much sums up my feelings about the book.

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Gosh, I really disagree about Kipling’s intent in Kim. I don’t think taking a quote from a character–the soldier who says the idea of natives ruling themselves is “madness”–and then ascribing that quote to the author himself is fair. I happen to be a writer myself, and I shudder to think that some of the things my less savory characters say could be confused with what I personally believe. I just finished reading Kim and I was amazed by how well Kipling understood the culture and how deeply Kim connected to his native friends, the lama, and the culture at large. The lama and Kim have the deepest, most meaningful relationship in the book; Kim is in awe of Huree Babu; and he is loyal to Mahtub. His relationships with the whites in this book, on the other hand, are superficial, full of suspicion and disdain, and only a means to an end. When, at one point, Kim falls prey to the pleasure of hearing himself praised by government officials, Kipling is quick to point this out as a failing.

I mean, at the end of the book, Kim says emphatically, in more than one way, to the lama: “I am not a Sahib; I am your chela.” If Kipling believed as the soldier did, I don’t think we’d see these lines in the book, and certainly not at the end, where they appear and where the reader is left to draw her final conclusion about who Kim is. Just my two cents. I thought it was actually an enlightened (no pun intended) book for its time.