Sneha Jaiswal's Blog, page 285

Kor’Thank: Barbarian Valley Girl

This weird little book is just what I needed after reading the fifteen fucking hundred pages long ‘A Suitable Boy’. Sorry for the ‘F’ bomb, but after reading Kent Wayne’s novel ‘Kor’ Thank: Barbarian Valley Girl’, I feel like it’s pretty fucking okay to drop some profanities now and then. Damn, I did it again.

Okay, I will start off the book review in earnest now. The author and I follow each other on WordPress and that’s how I learnt about ‘Kor’Thank’ and decided to get it on my kindle. He sort of warned me about how the book is “silly and vulgar”, but by then I was already laughing out loud at the pages and enjoying it.

The plot is pretty fucking crazy. A barbarian king called Kor’Thank from an alternate universe switches body with a vicious cheerleader Holly and things get chaotic. Contrary to my expectations, I actually liked reading Holly the cheerleader’s adventure as the king, more than Kor’s new life as a teen bitch on earth.

There are three protagonists as far as I am concerned –

Holly, who is pure evil. Evil enough to brain-damage the cheer-leading captain to become the Queen Bee herself. Imagine what such a girl would do when she ends up in the body of a King?! Chongha Peter Lee, a supposed genius, who hates Holly and is planning to get back at her for something she did to his dog. (Trying to keep it spoiler free, so I am not going to say what she did to the dog) Kor’Thank is the battle loving King of a people called the ‘Indashi’, who is nothing like Ms Holly. Peter Lee and his friend Eun become his guide to modern earth.

After Kor and Holly switch both bodies, the rest of the plot is spent on their novel experiences and their quest to get back to their own worlds. There is a nice unexpected little twist thrown in, which I am not going to reveal, but let’s just say that the twist makes it quite a fanatical tale for Holly the impostor King. There’s a lot of battles and blood during her reign. Peter Lee and Kor on the other side have a massive monster on their hands.

Here is the deal – I have never read anything like it! Never. Pretty sure there must be a lot of body swapping, multi-dimensional novels with a lot of profanity thrown in the mix, but for me, this was new territory. I couldn’t understand some bits, possibly because they were American pop-culture references that I couldn’t catch.

But I will be honest, the most fun I had was reading all the profane phrases the author concocts. Sample some of these – “Scram, cunt-sludge”; “Bring it on, dick-sniffers”; “Too late, Fuckgobble”. Well, there’s a lot more vulgarity in the book and it was such a riot to read! If you get offended by such language, the book is so not for you.

The author probably had a lot of fun writing this one, because it sure as hell comes across on the pages. There are some action sequences in the second-half that were written in a very arresting manner and were an absolute delight to imagine. The climax however was a little tame in comparison of the rest of the tale and could’ve been more dramatic.

If you want to read some crazy multi-dimensional material and don’t mind an overdose of psychedelics and teen demons, this is just the book you must pick. It’s a solid 4/5 for me. In the author’s words – It’s a High-School Absurdical.

Link to the author’s website – https://dirtyscifibuddha.com/

5 Centimeters per Second

The Japanese animated film ‘5 Centimeters per Second’ came way back in 2007 and is directed by Makoto Shinkai. The story tracks the relationships of Takaki Tono from his school years to when he is a working adult.

It has a very slow start, with a good chunk of the first few minutes spent in second-hand dialogue through wistful letters between the school going Takaki Tono and his friend Akari Shinohara. Both kids become exceptionally close due to their mutual frail health and social isolation at school. But Akari has to move away to a different school and the two keep in touch through letters, since it’s the early 90s.

The movie is divided into three parts, the second bit focuses on Takaki’s high-school life and a girl’s unrequited crush on him. While the third half was just fucking random, where we have an adult Takaki slogging away at work to keep his mind off a recent break-up.

As far as the animation is concerned, while it’s not as top-notch as some of its other Japanese counterparts, it’s pretty good. The colours and weather changes, especially the snow is animated beautifully. I like how the beginning of a harsh winter is used to signify the slow demise Takaki’s first love.

The movie is meant to be a serious film exploring relationships, but there wasn’t any emotional high-point in the story. The first part felt a little too intense for a friendship between two kids who are not even in high-school. Which is fine, I know how as children we are capable of feeling like Romeo and Juliet when were think we are in love. But it’s hard to take it too seriously.

It was the second part which was very relatable, it focuses on Kanae Sumida, a girl who is seriously infatuated with the reclusive Takaki but cannot get herself to confess her feelings. Haven’t we all been there before? Makoto Shinkai artfully brings about the teenage despair of having a fierce one-sided crush. I loved this segment of the film.

Things however fall apart in the third half. We are not told much about Makoto’s break-up or girlfriend. After making us invested in his character, the viewers are short-changed with a half-assed climax. It’s rushed, contrived and makes you wondering “what the fuck?!”.

The overall mood of “5 Centimeters per Second” is somber, it doesn’t have any fun moments at all. I think that kind of sucks the life out of this tale, because it’s not like the young protagonists are suffering from depression or any life-threatening disease, so why make the plot so serious without any reason? Most of the action takes place late in the evening, so there are a lot of dark tints that add to the oppressive tone.

The ending was extremely disappointing for me as a viewer, after so much build-up, we get nothing. Absolutely nothing. Also, you need a lot of patience and optimism to sit through this. I don’t think I would give it more than a 6/10.

The Babysitter – Review

Netflix dropped the trailer to “The Babysitter: Killer Queen” last week and it was so silly that I loved it! Because silly horror comedies are my weakness. The best kind of distraction on a dull weekend night. There was just a little problem – I hadn’t seen the first film.

If you are wondering why I hadn’t seen it already – I actually did try watching it two years back with a fellow-horror movie enthusiast, but we lost interest in the first 10 minutes because a lot of other stuff was happening at that point of time. This time around, I saw the film with the husband.

“I am not drunk enough to watch this film,” he complained mid-movie, while I laughed at some scene that he didn’t find mildly funny. The big problem with ‘The Babysitter’ is that there are a lot of pop-culture references that non-movie enthusiasts won’t understand. There was a scene with the lot of star-trek references that were completely lost on me too. At the cost of being ‘nerdy cool’, the makers alienate a lot of regular movie fans and bore them.

The plot is pretty simple – 12-year-old Cole is the only boy in his class who still has a babysitter; a very hot one at that. One night, he learns that she is a part of a cult that makes human sacrifices and finds himself fighting for his life in his own home. It’s like ‘Home Alone’ meets ‘Evil Dead’, although there are no ghosts or ghouls. Just a boy trying to save himself from a bunch of psychotic teens baying for his blood.

There are quite some gory slasher scenes that horror fans would enjoy screaming to. Not the scared kind of screaming, more like “ew, ew, ew” kind of gasps. The cast is very good-looking and all actors do their part well. Some of the stuff is insanely stupid and you know that the makers deliberately tried to do spoof like scenes to draw some laughs.

Despite having a short runtime of 90 minutes, ‘The Babysitter’ would have benefited from some snipping. I think they take too long to come to the whole horror bit, so the set-up to the conflict could have been shorter. Instead, the killing sequences could have been elongated a little to heighten the drama and horror a little. Most of the kill scenes are over too quickly. Some sappy romantic scenes get more screen time than they deserve.

Judah Lewis who plays the 12-year-old hero is definitely the saving grace of this film. He is adorable as the shy, starry-eyed nerd who has the hots for his gorgeous babysitter. While the movie is mediocre and probably didn’t need a sequel, Judah Lewis definitely deserved a second-shot. I hope the next one is more fun and the makers have learnt from their past mistakes.

Book Versus Series

I’ve already written about how I enjoyed reading the super-long ‘A Suitable Boy’. After finishing the novel, I binge-watched the BBC series based on the book and am dropping 10 differences between the book and series.

Lata, one of the central characters in the book was described to be dark. It’s something that really catches your attention because there are some snide remarks made about her skin colour in the very first few pages, like how the colour pink doesn’t really suit her. Her mother fears that she would have ‘black grandchildren’. However, in Mira Nair’s adaptation, the actor playing Lata is quite light-skinned, in fact, she is fairer than most of the other cast. It was unfortunate that Nair did not cast a darker actor to play the role, considering how Lata is said to be very attractive despite the colour of her skin.Since the actor playing Lata in the series is ‘fair’ (for the lack of a better word), obviously all the mean remarks about her skin colour do not make it to the adaptation either. Almost each time the actor appeared on the screen I would think “too fair”.Which brings me to another related disparity — her elder sister Savita is said to be fairer in the book and even more lovely to look at. That’s not the case in the series.Pran, the English professor who Savita is married to, was said to be very thin and sickly in the book. In the series, the actor looks stocky and is rather well built.I remember how there was some sort of “beauty and the beast” kind of comparison between Pran and Savita in the book. Savita is said to be light-skinned and beautiful, while Pran is dark and not very attractive. But the actors playing the roles don’t look mismatched at all.Lata’s best friend Malati was a disappointment, she was not as charming and quick-witted. Also, while Malati was said to have a better sense of dress than Lata, in the series, she is quite frumpy and Lata is dressed a lot smartly than her at all times.One of the most fun scenes in the book, the one where Maan, Pran’s younger brother is shown to go quite wild on the day of holi is given a major twist. While in the book, Maan goes to Pran’s house with his friend to play holi; in the series the holi celebrations takes place entirely at their father’s residence, who is also the state revenue minister.In the book, Maan harasses a senior professor by drowning him in water at Pran’s place on Holi day. In the series he humiliates the Home Minister instead — by drowning him in a water fountain. The incident leads to further rivalry between the two ministers.This might seem like a very minor detail, but what struck me right when I saw the trailer was that Lata constantly wears sleeveless blouses with her sarees. There is a scene where Mrs Mehra, her mother lovingly looks at her as she gets dressed to go out. But Seth’s conservative Mrs Mehra would have never approved of a skin-baring top, a little ‘too modern’ for the 1950s. In the book she was scandalized when her daughter-in-law wears a sleeveless blouse for a party.A lot of characters don’t make it to the series, which is understandable, because there would have been no time to do any justice to their arc. But one character who was undeservedly chopped off was that of Imtiaz Khan. While in the book, Maan’s best-friend Firoz has a twin brother Imtiaz, in the series, Firoz has no twin.

I originally made this post for Medium, where I’ve listed 50 differences. You can head to the site for the full list. Here’s the link to the post –

50 Ways in Which The BBC Series ‘A Suitable Boy’ Was Different from the Book

Coffees and Street Art

I had cold-coffee at a cafe for the first time since March this year. A friend of mine was in town and we decided to catch up, covered in our face-masks of-course. Our chairs in the cafe were so far apart that we couldn’t even fit in the selfie frame. Although, later we did get up and take one for keepsake.

It was nice to be beyond the 1km radius of my house, in familiar streets that would have been bustling with people otherwise.

“I could have never imagined this lane could be so empty on a Friday,” my friend exclaimed. We were at one of the ‘most happening’ areas in the city, but it wore a forlorn look.

“I know right, it’s crazy,” I nodded in agreement.

“Let’s go for a walk. I have not been out at all,” my friend said after were done with our coffee.

So we walked along what used to be a busy street, dotted with graffiti, empty cafes and a deserted metro station. On a normal day, it would have been filled with people trying to pose with the wall art for their instagram feeds. On the bright side, we didn’t have to wait for anybody to clear from the view to take pictures. I made my friend pose with ‘Love, Loss, Lockdown’, my debut fiction book for the gram.

We continued to walk after a very brief photo session. None of the usual street hawkers were around to bug us. Not even those random salesmen that pester you to sign up for some shit. A book store that is very popular with the locals was surprisingly closed. On our part, we tried to keep a good distance from the people that were also walking on the same side of the street. It wasn’t very hard. There were so few of them.

Get ‘Love, Loss, Lockdown’

I got my box of author copies delivered today. Yay!

Don’t ask me why it took me so freaking long to order them in the first place (lockdown restrictions). I feel like lining them in my book-shelf and hoarding them all. But I don’t even have any shelf-space left. Story of every book hoarder ever! And why the fuck are nice book shelves so bloody expensive?????

Anyway, add a copy of “Love, Loss, Lockdown” to your shelf. It’s a collection of 10 short stories set against the Covid19 pandemic. I feel like I need to clarify that it is NOT a romantic book. So if you are looking for some mush, skip this one. However, if you are looking for some interesting contemporary stories – GO BUY IT PLEASE. And consider leaving a little review on Amazon/GoodReads after you finish reading it. Means the world to Indie authors like me.

Country specific links to the book (both e-books and paperbacks are available in all the following countries) –

Amazon India

Amazon U.S

Amazon UK

Amazon Germany

Amazon France

Amazon Japan

Amazon Canada

P.S. You can find me on  Facebook, GoodReads and Instagram 

Reading ‘A Suitable Boy’ in 2020

When BBC dropped the trailer for its latest mini-series ‘A Suitable Boy’, an adaptation of Vikram Seth’s popular book by the same name, my interest was piqued. A few days later, when a friend learnt I hadn’t read the book, I was upbraided and informed it’s a book worth devouring.

Well, it has taken me exactly 10 days (and nights) to read this magnum opus of sorts, which is spread over a laborious 1500 pages and is set in the 1950s India, when the country was still settling into its newly attained freedom from the clutches of the British Raj. However, most of the plot unfolds in the fictional city of Brahmapur.

The book primarily focuses on three families that are linked to each other through marriage. First we have the Mehras, led by an emotional widowed Mrs Mehra, whose sole purpose in life is to find a ‘suitable boy’ for her younger daughter Lata, after she marries off the older one to a good Kapoor boy. The Kapoor clan is headed by the practical Congressman Mahesh Kappoor, who is vexed by the antics of his free-wheeling younger son Maan. The third family comprises of the Chatterjees, who are seated in Calcutta, an intellectual-poetic lot, who break into impromptu little ditties and talk in riddles.

While the easiest way to describe this book is by calling it a ‘quest’ of an Indian mother to find an apt groom for her daughter, Vikram Seth spares no theme under the sun to fill its pages. And declaring that it is merely a book about groom-hunting would do it gross injustice.

What struck me the most about the first few pages was the way ‘fair complexion’ was given so much importance, and how the central character – Lata, was pitied at for being dusky. It irritated me as a reader, but of-course ‘fair-skin obsession’ is a reality even in the 21st century. And that is what makes ‘A Suitable Boy’ such a delightful read, it takes place almost a century ago, well 70 years ago at least, yet, the themes it explores are so relevant even now. The fixation of Indian parents about finding the ‘right match’ for their children; the rising tensions between Hindus & Muslims; the uncomfortable caste equations that divide communities; the rampant corruption plaguing the political class; lascivious uncles molesting minors; toxic bullying in boarding schools; extramarital affairs and accidental pregnancies; mental health issues that are not taken seriously and what not. Reading this book made me feel like perhaps we are still stuck in the 1950s, just under better technological conditions.

Quite frankly, I couldn’t make myself like Lata much. For an educated nineteen-year-old, she is too emotional and weak-willed; one day she proclaims she ‘never wants to marry’ and the next day she is already head-over-heels in love with the first handsome man who gives her some attention. For someone who is portrayed as shy and intelligent, kissing a man without even bothering to find out what his full name is, seemed too out of character. Perhaps Seth tried to pander to readers and make the novel exciting, even though he had plenty of opportunities to do so throughout the course of the book and yet he chose to be rather austere & discreet in his descriptions of the love affairs of the other protagonists.

It looks like Seth deliberately played it safe with his novel and didn’t venture into anything that could be branded scandalous. The book came out in the early 1990s, after all. Despite striving to be conservative in his narrative, there is a lot of subtle hinting that Maan Kapoor shares more than a platonic friendship with his male ‘best friend’ Firoz. It is implied that the two men had an intimate friendship when they were younger. So there are a few fleeting scenes of homo-eroticism, that might even be missed by most readers. For example, the first such scene in the book was not between Maan and Firoz, but with the Rajkumar of Marh; the prince makes a sly pass at Maan but the latter laughs it off and warmly warns the prince against repeating his action (he strokes Maan’s thigh). But I liked how Maan seems to be very comfortable with his sexuality and is probably pan-sexual. However it’s his heterosexual attraction towards the devastatingly charming Saeeda Bai the singer that reigns supreme in his heart. In-fact, Maan who is intended to be the liveliest character, is indeed the most likable of all the hundreds of people that make their appearances in the book, despite his fatal flaws.

Another character that I liked was that of Haresh Khanna, a prospective candidate for Lata’s hand. While he is almost caricature like, there’s a lot to him that’s so ordinary, that it makes him lovable. He is a hard-working self-made man, who is honest to a fault and overtly optimistic. Lata’s older pompous prick of a brother is vehemently opposed to him as a potential suitor, owing to the superficial fact that he has an Indian accent and is not from a distinguished family. This bit brings me to another facet of the novel- most of the story takes place in the upper echelons of the Indian society. The Chatterjee patriarch is an affluent high-court judge in Calcutta, while the Kapoor head of family is a minister in the cabinet of Purva Pradesh, the fictional state of which Brahmapur is the capital. So there are a lot of fancy parties and interesting nightly jaunts that serve as excellent distractions for the younger players in the book.

Owing to the gargantuan scale of the book, Seth has the luxury of drawing each protagonist in a way that the reader begins to recognize who is who, even if they forget their names. I’ve always had this trouble with Jane Austen novels, where I would have trouble recognizing people, since she always crowds her stories with many individuals. This was not a challenge with Seth’s book. I would sometimes do a double-take at a name but then understand who it was due to the dialogue.

My biggest problem with the book is that it unnecessarily delves into a lot of sub-plots and some of the descriptions are so expansive that they serve no purpose at all and do nothing to further the plot. “For example, if Y is going to the market, Seth takes two pages to describe just the market and the shops, that’s just too much!” I complained to a fellow reader. Seth also goes into too many details of political canvassing in rural areas, which was absolutely boring in my view. I think I must have skipped a total of 100 pages, if not more, throughout the course of reading this book. That’s still less than 10% of the book, but even then, it’s just frustrating to know that a writer took so much effort into writing things that just don’t matter. Seth could have chopped 300/400 pages off this book and it would have probably gained more readers. The kinds who would run the other way by just looking at the book’s size.

It’s Seth’s effortless writing style and the delightful poetry that is peppered throughout the novel that makes ‘A Suitable Boy’ a fun reading experience. A lot of philosophical insights are injected in between, either borrowed from other English masters (and fairly attributed) or from the corners of Seth’s own mind. Sample this –

The girl persisted: ‘Don’t you remember?’
Amit suddenly became voluble. ‘I am so forgetful—’ he said; ‘—and forgettable,’ he added quickly, ‘that I sometimes wonder if I ever existed. Nothing I’ve ever done seems to have happened. . . .’

As a forgetful person myself, I could quite relate to these lines, for if we don’t remember certain things, maybe they never happened at all? Our memory obliterates their existence. I wondered if Seth fashioned the character of Amit Chatterjee, the poet, after himself. But a little reading up revealed that it’s the youngest of the Chatterjees, the 13-year-old Tapan, who was inspired from Seth’s own experiences at a boarding school. In an unexpected little twist, it is revealed that Tapan is the object of obsession of a senior boy, who spares no efforts in harassing him or feeling him up. A fact that he finally confesses to his second brother Dipankar in tears. The affection, proximity and understanding between all sets of siblings in the book is quite endearing.

What is worth mentioning here is the unique relationship shared between each couple that appears in the book. Women are not just mere household fixtures, and in some relationships, it’s the lady of the house that calls the shots. I enjoyed the brief but fiery appearances of Begum Abida Khan who is a MLA in the opposition and constantly tears into her Congress rivals in the Assembly. While there are docile characters who are completely overshadowed or oppressed by their husbands, there are also carefree women on the other side of the spectrum, who refuse to be chained by the ties of matrimony or to one man.

Seth does a lot of brilliant juxtaposing in the novel, on one page you would read about the lively jazz nights in the ‘city of joy’, but after a few pages there would be a religious congregation gone wrong in Brahmapur; young men would be slitting each other’s throats and filling the streets with corpses. At one point, I felt like the writer overdid the religious rioting, even though each one is written in a chilling and gripping manner. How an innocent celebration can turn into bloody carnage is succinctly described. Amid this madness and chaos, all the Mehra matriarch can think of is the matrimonial prospects of her youngest darling Lata.

Despite finding myself skipping pages at points, never did I think of abandoning the book altogether. The narrative kept me hooked. It’s a kind of love-hate relationship that you share with someone you love, they are not going to be interesting all the time, there will be times when you’d desperately need a break from them, they would bore you, irritate you and tire you out, but you would still go back to them and stay with them till the end. Reading Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy’ was like that.

The End

P.S. If contemporary fiction & short-stories interest you, following are the links to my latest book ‘Love, Loss, Lockdown’ –

Amazon India

Amazon U.S

Amazon UK

Amazon Germany

Amazon France

If I’ve missed your country, look for it on Amazon or on your kindle store.

Class of ’83 – Best Forgotten

To be honest, I loved the trailer of the new Netflix film ‘Class of ’83’. It was intense, intriguing, with a gripping background score that blended perfectly with the narrative. But like some trailers, the makers packed in all the best bits in the teaser to draw in viewers.

The film is set in the bustling Bombay of the 1980s, when gang-wars were rampant and blood stained the city’s streets. The plot is loosely based on a novel by Hussain Zaidi, a former investigative journalist who is famous for his crime-writing. Actor Bobby Deol plays the role of an honest upright cop, who is punished by the political class for trying to fight the system. He is banished from active duty and is posted as the dean at a police academy in Nashik. In his new role as the dean, he trains five young cops to beat the system and help eliminate all the key players of the Bombay underworld.

This could have been a great crime film, but all of its potential is wasted and the actors are failed by bad writing and poor action direction. The guns go booming several times in the movie, but none of the scenes are shot well. There is not single action sequence that holds your attention or makes you go ‘woah’. The dialogues are unnecessarily heavy and drown the viewer’s interest. It appears that the script-writers were trying too hard to sound witty, so almost every line sounds like terrible attempts at making it to a ‘cool quote’ book. There is no normal banter between anybody. Most dialogues are delivered with a dead-pan face.

Luckily for Bobby Deol, his character is written to be the broody types, so he does his part well. The five actors who play the young firebrand killer cops just don’t have enough back-stories to make their partnership seem genuine. The makers waste time in freeze-frames where nothing is happening and in some useless flashbacks to Deol’s past with his wife. Instead, they could have worked on giving the younger actors more space, for the viewer to be able to connect with their characters.

The climax is just underwhelming and hackneyed. There is an intense gun-fight, well, it should have been intense, but it wasn’t. Just some boring ‘bang-bang-bang’ and the film heads to its conclusion.

Anup Soni, the actor who became a household name by hosting the popular Indian TV ‘Crime Patrol’ does a fair job with the little part he has as the corrupt politician in cahoots with the goonda class. Unfortunately for him, ‘Crime Patrol’ episodes are way more interesting than this film.

Storing Story Ideas

I saw an interesting little thread on Twitter yesterday where someone asked writers about what they did if a potential story idea struck them. There were only three responses. All of them were on the lines of “I jot them down in a notebook”.

One of them elaborated a little. “I used to think that just having them in my head was enough, but then I realized I couldn’t recall them later when I really wanted to. So now I write them down in a diary,” was the reply. Or something like that.

I have never written down the random story ideas that strike me out of the blue. Not even the story ideas for the ten short stories that I wrote for my latest book “Love, Loss, Lockdown”. The loose themes/ideas were just in my head and that was enough. Perhaps there wasn’t much chance of me forgetting anything, since the inception and execution of the ideas happened over such a short period. I decided to write a short stories collection loosely themed on the Covid19 pandemic in March 2020 and was done writing and publishing the book by June.

This is not to say that I am against the idea of jotting down potential story plots. A month ago I purchased four notebooks, exclusively for writing down all things related to writing fiction and then selling them. Just all sorts of notes and pointers that might be helpful. The pages are all empty is a different matter. The intent is there. However, just a few days after the notebooks arrived, I read something about how ‘Horror King’ Stephen King allegedly said that one doesn’t need a notebook for their ideas. King apparently believes that if you cannot even remember them, they are probably not worth writing. Makes sense right? Good stories are the ones that stay with you forever, or at least for a long time.

However, there are bound to be many writers who would disagree. Here is the thing – human memory is fickle and disloyal. Sometimes, our brain does forget even the most important things. For example, last week I was supposed to attend an international virtual zoom meet organized by Quora, but completely forgot about it, despite looking forward to it. One cannot imagine the sense of brief regret that filled me when I realized it a full day later.

While it’s true that if a great story idea strikes us out of nowhere, we would remember it if it’s a good one; there is also the very real possibility of us suffering from premature dementia or having such a shitty memory that it just cannot recall things that matter. So, if you are not an undisciplined, lazy idiot like me, you are better off writing those potential plots for your next new novel down.

P.S. If contemporary fiction & short-stories interest you, following are the links to my latest book ‘Love, Loss, Lockdown’ –

Amazon India

Amazon U.S

Amazon UK

Amazon Germany

Amazon France

If I’ve missed your country, look for it on Amazon or on your kindle store.

Rebecca’s Choice – Review

‘Rebecca’s Choice’, a historical fiction novel set in the late 19th century is written effortlessly and that’s one of the strongest points of the book. The words flow fluidly, so they keep the reader hooked to the pages, even if some of the events unfolding might not be very exciting.

Rebecca is married to Geoffrey, a wealthy businessman who is more passionate about his weather station than his young beautiful wife. The first half of the novel is spent in the domestic life of the leading lady that is disrupted by a few tragedies involving her friends. I really enjoyed reading the brief sub-plot of a doctor suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder due to his handling of the Cholera epidemic. I wish that sub-plot would have been explored a little more by the author.

The heroine is confronted with the ‘choice’ referred to in the title only in the second half of the book. I had hoped for more conflict in the earlier parts, but there wasn’t much going on, at least not in the protagonist’s own personal life. The second-half is more fun and things pick up steam. Debut author Heidi Gallacher does a great job with bringing the scenes to life with her words, be it a charity ball on the grounds of Tredelerch, the fascinating rail rides or the little picnics by the countryside.

I wouldn’t want to give any spoilers, but towards the climax, Rebecca has to make some tough decisions to secure her future. My only grouse with the climax is that it was too rushed. While my usual complain with novels is that they could have been better off without a few dozen pages, with ‘Rebecca’s Choice’, I feel Gallacher could have added at-least a few more pages to smoothen the ending.

Since historical fiction is a genre I really love, this book was a breezy fun read for me. You can get the book on Amazon.

My rating – on 5 stars.

P.S – I published my second book ‘Love, Loss, Lockdown’. It’s a collection of short stories set against the Covid19 pandemic in India, get a copy if it piques your interest. It’s also available for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.