Book Reviews

We are three months into 2021 and it’s time to take stock of things in life. COVID-19 is still here, Europe is going back into sporadic lockdowns and we are still asking–WHEN WILL THIS END? But it’s not all gloom and doom. On the personal front, with a new job where I sometimes get paid to write (yay!), a kid back in school and my first shot of COVID vaccine around the corner, I would…

Heyer’s flawed yet deeply engaging regency romances are my personal palette cleanser. They are my go-to novels as I take a break from intense books or when trying to change genres. Language and character development satisfies the literary snob in me, while the plot line is fluffy enough to entertain over-worked, hassled mom who doesn’t have the time for complex storylines. About Frederica Frederica does not differ from her other works – predictable yet fun.…

End of the year is a time for cheer and celebrations; it’s also time to catalog another year of our life. What you achieved (staying alive and not catching COVID), places you travelled to (nowhere, because COVID), things you ate (loads of home-cooked meals, because COVID) and books read (loads, coz what else were you gonna to do because COVID!!) So here are my obligatory ten-books-of-the-year list that literally nobody asked for. It was hard…

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series caught my attention by its lovely cover jacket and an intriguing premise — a young governess hired to educate three children who appeared to be raised by wolves. While I rarely wade into children’s books, I have to say this was a joyful discovery. In The Mysterious Howling, the first book in the series, a very young Penelope Lumley of Swanburne Academy finds employment at Ashton Place. She is to…

So this is a bit of rant and I usually stay away from really negative reviews, but I just couldn’t get over how appalling I found these books. And I admit I haven’t read only two-thirds of the Meluha Trilogy, but that’s enough to conclude that these are not for me. Before I make a case for why these were not worth my time, the series has been constantly on the best-seller list and is…

Alan Bennett is most famous for his Olivier & Tony Award-winning play, The History Boys, a dramedy on the trials of high school boys heading to college. With The Uncommon Reader he veers into lightweight literary territory, distinct in his charm but low on gravitas. In The Uncommon Reader, we enter the royal household of England, where the Queen has just discovered the joy of reading on a visit to a mobile library. To accept…

Like much of USA, I have been glued to the television and phone over the last few days. Afraid that this might become an unhealthy habit, I determined that a good distraction was in order. So here I am attempting to do a round-up of all the books I read in the last two months, with the hope I might pick another shortly. Kiddo started school and work picked up pace, so reading was SLOW.…

Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (Midnight Riot in US) suffers a bit from an identity crisis. It tries to be a fantasy-fiction novel, a police procedural, a London guide, a commentary on race all at the same time, but never quite succeeding. There is so much going on in every single page, that it was often hard to remember how I arrived at a particular point in the story and whether it was significant. The…