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Five-star YA reads of 2019

Posted on 6 January 202025 December 2020by Payal
2019 YA covers

The one good thing about 2019, was that it was a fantastic reading year. This was mainly thanks to NetGalley letting me read pre-publication proofs in exchange for reviews. Of course, there were good and bad books—including that eminently forgettable whodunit in which the only gay character was also the deranged killer—and also very unremarkable […]

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Review: Jinxed by Amy McCulloch

Posted on 18 August 201925 December 2020by Payal
Jinxed cover

A round of applause to Amy McCulloch for a book (the first of a series) about girls in engineering. That and the the world-building were the two things that got me hooked on Jinxed, even though it ended in a cliffhanger, which I hate. The story is set in a time about 50 years from […]

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Older and wiser…again

Posted on 24 January 2018by Payal

It’s stock-taking-of-the-year time and the only thing I can think of is, 2017 was the year I discovered Berena! Well, in the larger scheme of things, the year that just went by was a horrible one. Right-wing bigots continued to be in power, the digital enslavement of Indian citizens went on, the economy remained effed, […]

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Career of Evil — finish or abandon?

Posted on 15 August 201725 December 2020by Payal

Should you review a book you’re not sure you’ll finish? Don’t know the answer to that one, so I just won’t call this a review. To be fair, I wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to read Robert Galbraith’s Career of Evil so I can’t exactly moan about feeling let down. It sort dropped into […]

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Why I want you to watch Holby City

Posted on 13 August 201725 December 2020by Payal

**Note: Here be spoilers.** #1 Because representation matters The older I get the less patience I have for stories about men, for men. It doesn’t help that this covers most of TV. This started me on a quest to seek out series featuring women or series that have stories about women (not the same thing). […]

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Wolfenstein: The New Order

Posted on 13 February 201725 December 2020by Payal

There’s a lot of shooting everything in sight in Wolfenstein: The New Order (hereafter W:TNO), plus a decent amount of sneaking about if you so wish, but the overarching attraction of the game for me has been the premise its storyline is based on: What if the Nazis won World War II?

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Review: Shatter Me

Posted on 11 February 201725 December 2020by Payal

[NOTE: I feel a little bad roasting this book here, mainly because if you can’t find even one good thing to say, then should you say anything at all? But I’ve run out of patience ploughing through it, so here goes…] That hypothetical fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous? There’s a reason one […]

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Limbo

Posted on 16 January 201725 December 2020by Payal
Limbo

You know that feeling of being in a dream, where the world feels a bit out of focus, where everything is just a little out of reach, and where you have a sense of knowing that you have to go on but no idea why? Well, Limbo is sort of like that. I would go […]

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Book review: Come, before Evening Falls

Posted on 29 July 2016by Payal

Yesterday, at the Scholastic Writing Awards ceremony in Delhi, I ran into the author Manjul Bajaj. We were only introduced to the each other just as we were leaving, but we had a nice walk down the stairs talking about a mutual writer friend, Monideepa Sahu. Anyway, I digress… Meeting Manjul reminded me of a […]

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Book review: Asmara’s Summer

Posted on 2 June 2016by Payal

Is there anything more important to a teenager than her street cred? No, at least not for Asmara. So when her Canada plans are cancelled and instead she has to spend a month with her grandparents in the conservative and definitely un-posh part of town, it is instant social disaster. So Asmara does the only […]

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