Payal Dhar's Blog: Writer's Log, page 8

Review #30: Gallows View

Phew, this update has been a long time coming! This time it is the first in Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series, Gallows View. Banks is new to the town of Eastvale and it’s been an uphill task earning the trust of the community. And now, with a peeping Tom on the loose and an old woman found dead in her home, things just got a little more tricky.

Gallows View is set in the breathtaking Yorkshire Dales that any reader of James Herriot will instantly recognize. As a first in a highly successful series that now has over twenty books, it is interesting to go back to where it all started. So without further ado…

Read the full review here.

~PD

Review #29: Eleanor and Park

We imagine teenage love to be beautiful, fluffy, innocent and happy. We’re wrong. It’s usually messy, complicated, confusing and painful. Eleanor and Park is one such story. A couple of teenage misfits find friendship and love, first through comics and mixtapes, and then through endless conversations and each other’s company. But they are hardly the poster kids for teenage romance—the “perfect” Korean-American Park and the awkward, shy Eleanor were always headed for disaster, weren’t they?

Unless you’re dead inside—which I was quite sure I was before I read this— you won’t come away from Eleanor and Park without having felt something. Read the full review here, or better still, go and read the book.

~PD

Review #28: No Guns at My Son’s Funeral

How can one talk about war with children without ramming propaganda down their throats? History books don’t do it; neither does the media. Even in fiction, the plot is usually predicated around having to defeat an enemy. There have been children’s books, however, that have taken on the tricky task of breaking down the complexities of conflict situations. Paro Anand’s No Guns at My Son’s Funeral, published in 2005, is one of them.

No Guns born out of a project that Paro Anand worked on with children in Baramullah, Kashmir, through the story of a young boy, gives us a “child’s-eye view of exactly how complicated loyalties can get in this tinderbox situation”. In the backdrop of Kargil, Anand was struck by how every child in those tense times wanted peace, and realized that their stories needed to be heard.

Read my full review at Goodbooks.in

~PD

Review #27: No Guns at My Son’s Funeral

How can one talk about war with children without ramming propaganda down their throats? History books don’t do it; neither does the media. Even in fiction, the plot is usually predicated around having to defeat an enemy. There have been children’s books, however, that have taken on the tricky task of breaking down the complexities of conflict situations. Paro Anand’s No Guns at My Son’s Funeral, published in 2005, is one of them.

No Guns born out of a project that Paro Anand worked on with children in Baramullah, Kashmir, through the story of a young boy, gives us a “child’s-eye view of exactly how complicated loyalties can get in this tinderbox situation”. In the backdrop of Kargil, Anand was struck by how every child in those tense times wanted peace, and realized that their stories needed to be heard.

Read my full review at Goodbooks.in

~PD

Reviews #24, #25, #26, #27: The Song of the Lioness quartet

If you’re a reader of young adult fantasy and the name Tamora Pierce doesn’t sound familiar, I’d advise you to rectify that situation as soon as possible. Pierce specializes in fantasy adventure featuring brave, enterprising young women who want to follow their dreams. Her best known works are set in the make-believe universe of Tortall, where you can find magic, heroism, intrigue and a whole lot more, not to mention a slew of interesting characters.

The Song of the Lioness is a series of four books featuring young Alanna, at first an eleven-year-old girl who yearns to do something that is forbidden to her, that is, become a knight. So, of course, she disguises herself as a boy and switches places with her brother. And thus begins a rollicking tale that features not just friendship and adventure, but also magic, politics and war.

Song of the Lioness I: Alanna: The First Adventure

Song of the Lioness II: In the Hand of the Goddess

Song of the Lioness III: The Woman Who Rides Like a Man

Song of the Lioness IV: Lioness Rampant

~PD

Review #23: The Screaming Staircase

The Screaming Staircase is the first in the Lockwood & Co. series by Jonathan Stroud (yes, of the hilarious Bartimaeus fame). The Lockwood series too has an intriguing alternate reality as its setting: it is based in England, but not quite as we know it. For, some 50 or so years ago, for reasons unknown, the dead came back to flit among the living—in the form of ghosts.

Unfortunately, while ghosts can harm everybody, only children can see or hear them. Those with exceptional psychic talent are packed off to train as psychic investigators, and are snapped up by agencies that specialize in cleaning up hauntings. In one such agency, a rather ramshackle and useless one called Lockwood & Co., Lucy Carlyle, all of 15, walks in to seek her fortune. Lucy teams up with Anthony Lockwood and George Cubbins, and they plunge headlong into a dangerous assignment that involves spending one night in England’s most haunted house.

Read the full review.

~PD

Review #22: The Secret Diary of the World’s Worst Friend

How would you fare in a test of friendship? How far would you go for your friends? Are you even a good friend? These are questions many youngsters (and perhaps oldsters as well) are often called upon to answer some time or another in their lives. In Subhadra Sen Gupta’s The Secret Diary of the World’s Worst Friend, these very questions are asked and answered.

Framed within the question of friendship, this young adult novel also examines social privilege and the complexities therein:

There is no doubt that we have a generation of kids growing up in air-conditioned comfort, ensconced in their bubble of entitlement, blissfully unaware of the battles most of their contemporaries have to overcome just to get basic education, not to mention food and shelter. It is also true that there are some excellent government schools churning out solid future citizens. And there is little doubt that, like [the protagonist’s] father, most of us do subscribe to the ‘better class of people’ concept. (Goodbooks.in)

Some interesting questions are asked in this novel by one of India’s veteran children’s authors. Read my full review at Goodbooks.in.

~PD

Review #21: Looking Good Dead

This is the second book in Peter James’s series about Detective Superintendent Roy Grace from Brighton CID. Grace, haunted by the unsolved case of his missing wife, is hurled into a grisly murder investigation when a headless body of a young lawyer is found. Meanwhile, businessman Tom Bryce finds out the hard way that trying to do the right thing is often a very bad idea.

Looking Good Dead, while not dazzling crime fiction, is a decent read. James has a knack for storytelling and keeping you interested even when you can’t feel perfectly convinced with the story. If you’re looking for a gripping read for the weekend, you could do much worse.

Read my full review.

~PD

Review #20: The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

Grief is a universal human phenomenon, something that each one of is likely to come face to face with at some point in our lives. But what is it really? A feeling, a way of being, a reaction, a strategy? Can grief be studied and mapped? Padma Viswanathan’s The Ever After of Ashwin Rao delves into these questions in the wake of a tragedy that left hundreds bereft:

[On 23 June 1985] an Air India flight between Montreal and New Delhi via London was bombed out of the sky over Irish waters. More than 300 people died, mostly Canadian citizens of Indian origin…. What followed was two decades of investigative and legal bumbling and hand-wringing. The Khalistani militant group Babbar Khalsa were deemed responsible for the bombing, ostensibly as revenge for Indira Gandhi’s Operation Blue Star. The Canadian authorities, accused of ignoring warning signs, tried to wash their hands of the incident, calling it an ‘Indian’ tragedy, even though that was not how Canadians, including Indian-Canadians, saw it. Investigations culminated almost two decades later in what was Canada’s most expensive trial. However, in the 2005 trial, where the novel’s timeline culminates, no one was found guilty.

Twenty years after the incident, an Indian psychologist called Ashwin Rao embarks on a study of the families of the victims, intending to find out what happens to those who get left behind. But his interest isn’t merely academic, for he too is one of those who got left behind.

Full review at DeccanHerald.com.

~PD

Review #19: The Adventures of Stoob — A Difficult Stage

Stoob is back, older and wiser. The carefree days of childhood are a teeny speck in the past, now that he’s in middle school! Yes, class six brings with it not just long trousers, but new responsibilities, new friends and new challenges. This is Samit Basu’s second book in The Adventures of Stoob series.

As if all this wasn’t excitement enough, Stoob and his friends decide to take a shot at stardom by signing on for some theatre adventures. But even the misguided producers of Teen Rama Adventurezzz are unprepared for the mayhem that follows. A full review is available at Goodreads.in. For a review of the first book, go here.

~PD