Satin: A Stitch in Time has been getting some media attention lately. There have been two reviews in the last week, and DNA Mumbai were offering it as a prize in their weekly “Caption This” contest (see image).
Satin was reviewed by novelist Ira Trivedi in the Asian Age. The review is mixed, since the reviewer finds it “disturbingly similar to Harry Potter”, but there are also factual errors in the review, including a phantom character, “Yarik, Fahe’s younger brother”! Anyhow, she does make a point, and I cannot deny that the success of Harry Potter has made it easier for authors like me.
She says: “I wish that Dhar had kept the book simple and just stuck to resolving the mystery of satin, but we have too many mysterious characters that bring along their own complex storylines. All in all, the book is mildly entertaining, though it feels like a rip-off of Harry Potter in many ways.” Read it here.
The other review is in Businessworld by Proteeti Banerjee, who happens to be a friend and is very familiar with my work. While she feels that “Satin: A Stitch In Time is the perfect book for lazy, rainy weekend afternoons,” she does warn that “the characters… become homogenous to the point of blurring into one another.” Read the rest here.
~PD
🙂 I have to admit I was a bit wary of writing the review, precisely because you’re such an old friend – but then I dealt with it by mentioning it within the review itself. Anyhow, hope you liked it.
I was frankly appalled by Ira Trivedi’s review, not least because of the factual errors – she didn’t appear to have read the book at all! If she had, there’s no way she could have called it ‘similar’ to HP, disturbingly or otherwise. I actually left a comment on her review, pointing out her mistakes and disagreeing with her – I’ll have to go check to see if they published it.
And I still think of the characters as Kinnel and Tasil!