Reviews

The reviews have been a bit scarce the past couple of months, mostly because I’ve been too busy reading. But I did review these two for Goodbooks.in: The Ghost Hunters of Kurseong by Shweta Taneja Having been part of the generation that grew up on a staple diet of Enid Blyton, one does sometimes miss […]

What do you get when you take a brilliantly imagined world and stir in a somewhat disappointing plot and a completely bizarre ending? In the case of Louise O’Neill’s dystopian spec-fic novel Only Ever Yours, the answer is, a chillingly compelling tale that keeps you hooked and horrified in equal measure. The time is the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]