Payal Dhar's Blog: Writer's Log, page 6

Review #52: Fangirl

Yep, it’s time for the final review of 2015, and the pride of place goes to Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl.

At its heart, Fangirl is (yet another?) teenage romance, but it would be doing it a great disservice to call it just that. This is a story of a tumultous year in the life of eighteen-year-old Cath. With her twin hellbent on going solo, Cath doesn’t know how she’s going to face university, a new roommate, new people everywhere. For Cath has extreme social anxiety. The only place she’s completely comfortable is in the anonymity of the fan-fiction forum, where she is a star.

Full review

~PD

Review #51: The Man on the Balcony

Thirty years before Henning Mankell began plying his trade as writer of Scandinavian crime fiction, there was the husband-and-wife pair of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They collaborated on a series of ten police procedural novels starring Martin Beck, a superintendent with the Stockholm police. The Man on the Balcony is the third book.

Unfortunately, these books are somewhat difficult to lay hands on, but suffice it to say, if you spot them anywhere, grab them. For this is the original Scandinavian crime fiction, and what’s more, they are great stories as well.

Full review here

~PD

Review #50: The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency

The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is not your usual detective story. That’s because Mma Precious Ramotswe is not your usual detective—she is “the only lady private detective in Botswana”. And no, you need not be a fan of crime fiction or detective stories to enjoy this book.

Mma Ramotswe decided to set up a detective agency from the proceeds of her late Daddy’s cattle sales, and despite some initial hiccups, the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency does decent business. Mma Ramotswe’s methods might not be conventional, but you can’t say she doesn’t get results! Give this hilarious and heartwarming book—the first in the series—a miss and you’ll regret it for all your reading life.

Full review here

~PD

Review #49: Neverwhere

Neverwhere is a stunning, imaginative tale of an “ordinary” man who accidentally stumbles into a parallel existence called London Below, which is a sort of murky underbelly of the regular London, and gets swept away in an unlikely adventure.

Neverwhere happened to be the first Neil Gaiman book I read. Needless to say, I sort of fell in love.

The forgotten tunnels, long-abandoned Tube stations, unused wartime passages — all house a so-called “homeless” population of London. People who have slipped through the cracks in one way or another, people who can speak to rats, scavengers of the most extreme kind… in fact, people almost as diverse as those found above ground.

Full review here

Review #48: Our Nana Was a Nutcase

Much as I admire Ranjit Lal, I’d have to admit that some of his recent work has been a mix of hits and misses. Despite that, he has remained a pioneer of sorts in Indian children’s writing, picking up topics that have been considered taboo for younger readers. In Our Nana Was a Nutcase, four children watch their beloved grandfather being consumed by dementia and grapple with how that changes their lives.

Full review here

~PD

Review #47: Thief (2014)

First things first: the 2014 release of Thief is actually the fourth instalment of the cult stealth series by the same name. Only, it’s a reboot of the original series, and while fans of the previous Thief games can expect to resurrect their gameplay as Garret, the slate has been wiped clean and he has a new back story.

The story opens with Garret the master thief with his apprentice/partner Erin in a prologue, which puts you right in the thick of the excitement. You are catapulted into a heist that is a sort of tutorial, teaching you how to control Garret, to make him run, jump, climb, sneak and, of course, steal. The major objective is learning how to stay hidden, use shadows and stay silent. By the end of the prologue, Garret has stolen Erin’s ‘claw’, an instrument that helps her scale high walls, while Erin herself falls through a glass roof right into the middle a strange ritual that is taking place, and she’s presumed dead.

The story unfolds as the chapters commence. Garret, having returned to The City after a period of time, finds that it is being terrorized by the evil Baron, while being in the throes of a deadly plague called the Gloom, which is killing off its less fortunate residents. A lockdown is in place, while a rebellion simmers. Garret’s hub is the Clock Tower, from where he starts his missions or sets out to explore The City. The gameplay progresses in the form of chapters, peppered with a number of side missions. While in the former you find out more about the Baron, the plague and what really happened to Erin, the side missions help you make some extra cash to purchase upgrades and weapons to keep yourself sharp. As for the main story, truth be told, it isn’t terribly exciting and I lost track of it after a point.

Thief is a brilliantly immersive environment. The City, with its alleys and backstreets, houses and shops, is a joy to explore—until, that is, you get sick of going up and down the same lanes and tunnels. Garret can not only sneak about at street level, but also climb on to roofs, walls and various other conveniently placed ledges and parapets, go through houses, and in some cases swing across using a rope arrow. The lighting effects are fantastic, the dark, gloomy atmosphere just perfect. There are places where the non-playing characters get stuck in a dialogue loop, repeating the same things ad nauseum, which is annoying, but you learn to ignore it.

The sneaking about is fantastic, even though in many places the more fancy stealth-work needs you to work with predetermined routes. For example, the rope arrows can only be used in specific places. Another example is Garret’s cat-like agility, but which comes into use in a few predetermined situations, where he nimbly shimmies up pipes and ledges, and more or less climbs up the side of a building or structure. Even getting on to rooftops and parapets is limited. It would have been great if it was a fully open-ended world, but perhaps that’s too much to ask for in terms of graphics. There is a map provided to aid in navigation, but the annoying part is that it is broken up into numerous locations, so you need to get used to load screens. There are times when getting from one part of the city to the other is a tad painful, having to endure all the map sections and numerous load screens.

Garret, apart from his bordering-on-the-superhuman agility, also possesses something called Focus power. It’s rather like Instinct in Hitman: Absolution, letting him intensify his senses. Focus helps Garret pick up on loot as well as places of interest, spot traps and slow down time. Focus also goes some way in helping pick locks faster, but I never needed to use it. You can run out of Focus pretty fast, so it helps to be prudent with it, at least in the beginning. The Swoop power lets Garret get from cover to cover in double-quick time, but for some reason it didn’t work for me.

I played at the ‘normal’ difficulty level, called Thief, in which the AI was alternately extremely stupid and incredibly challenging. Arguably the most difficult level was Chapter 5: The Forsaken, which takes you to the Moira Asylum in search of answers about what happened to Erin. Apart from being supremely creepy, this is also the level when your deal with non-human ‘enemies’—the Freaks. They are sensitive to sound, but can’t see you, so you can get past them if you are extremely quiet, which is difficult given the environment, which is strewn with glass shards that crunch under your feed. They are also deadly in a melee so engaging them in combat is foolhardy. Figuring out how to defeat them is part of the fun, but don’t play this chapter in the dead of the night when you’re alone in the house (I did, and regretted it).

If you’re looking for a game that features non-stop action, Thief is not going to be your cup of tea. Unlike various other stealth-based games, Hitman and Deus Ex come to mind, where stealth is just one of your strategies, here waiting, watching and creeping about is the whole point of the game. Combat is possible, but quite difficult, almost impossible with multiple attackers. Most of the time, you find yourself lurking in the shadows, waiting for exactly that right moment to slip past a couple of unsuspecting guards. Using the shadows is rather nifty, though aided to a great extent by the light ‘orb’ on the corner of your screen that lets you know if you’re visible to those around you. The exhilaration of crouching just inches away from a passing guard or sneaking up behind an unsuspecting quarry and silently picking their pocket is quite something else.

That said, the gameplay feels repetitive after a while and the story just isn’t exciting enough. I love stealth games and I loved Thief, but not enough to play it all the way through to the end. Will I go back to it some day? Yes, definitely!

RATING: 7/10

~PD

Review #46: Mara and the Clay Cows

When we were kids, we would listen to same story every day with lunch during the summer holidays. As our grandmother lined us up to feed us, we would demand the story of Rakhal and the rakkhosh (demon), who are frequent characters in Bangla folktales. If she ever got sick of telling the same story over and over again, year after year, she never said so. That’s the magic of folktales, though—that they never get old.

Parismita Singh’s Mara and the Clay Cows is a graphic novel based on a Tanghkul Naga folktale about a young boy getting in touch with his magic. This is a fairly simple story and definitely not a new one as far as themes go, but with a fresh coat of paint.

Mara is an outsider, with no clan to claim as his own, no friends, and with strange powers that make the other children fear and shun him. But the day he unwittingly fashions himself a pair of smart-alecky miniature talking cows in clay, his life takes a bewildering turn. Encouraged by his tiny cows, he befriends a girl called Shiroi in a meadow, who takes him on a thrilling, terrifying journey — jumping on to the jet stream and flying, dodging a gaggle of migrating geese, all the way to the mysterious floating Sky Kingdom of the North, in search of the Chief Magician.

Read the review at Goodbooks.in

~PD

Review #45: Carry On

Imagine a multi-volume fantasy series with mages, magic, dragons, pixies, spells, prophecies and a great evil. Now imagine that only the last book of this series exists. That’s what Carry On is. If that’s not all, it is also the author’s retelling of a fan-fiction written by a character in her previous novel, Fangirl

If all that sounds too complex, here’s what you should know: Carry On is about magic, a Chosen One who’s completely useless, a gay vampire, and an unknown evil force hell bent on ripping a hole in the fabric of magic. Since our hero is supremely incapable of saving the world, will his friends rise to the occasion? Perhaps even his nemesis, who’s supposed to kill him but is actually in love with him?

Head to the review of Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On

~PD

Reviews #43 and #44: Golem’s Eye and Ptolemy’s Gate

Bartimaeus, the irascible, cheeky, footnote-loving djinn, first made his appearance in Jonathan Stroud’s The Amulet of Samarkand, and subsequently went on to star in three other books in the series.

The story of Bartimaeus’ years with the young magician Nathanial (John Mandrake) and with Kitty Jones, variously enemy and ally, spans the first three books of the Bartimaeus sequence.

Read all the reviews at Writeside.net:

The Amulet of Samarkand (guest review)
The Golem’s Eye
Ptolemy’s Gate

~PD

Review #42: India A to Z

How do you sum up India in a single volume? Is it even possible? Veena Seshadri and Vidya Mani take up the challenge in a volume called India A to Z: An Alphabetical Tour of Incredible India, a “bumper infopedia… packed with fascinating facts, terrific trivia and colourful cartoons on just about everything in India”.

It attempts to break India down into digestible alphabetical chunks. So, if you wanted to know whether dinosaurs ever lived here, turn to ‘R for Rajasaurus’; if you were after the story of the first ever airmail sent (which happened in India, incidentally), go to ‘P for Post’; the Koh-i-Noor controversy is alluded to in K; for a monthly festival round-up, head to F; or perhaps you’d like to look up desi Nobel Laureates, under N, of course. Well, you get the drift — the book basically takes you on an alphabetical journey of India.

Full review at Goodbooks.in

~PD