As a reader, I stay away from the most recent bestsellers cause I am not always the biggest fan of modern prose. Once in a while, though, a book calls out to me, as did Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. I saw it recommended on all my online reading apps, propped up on the local library shelves, and finally on my Netflix feed. I don’t know if this was a cross-platform marketing conspiracy,…
Top Reads
Shannon Chakraborty, the Hugo-nominated author of The Daevabad Trilogy, returns with a new fantasy series set in the pirate-infested waters of the 12th-century Arabian Sea. When the novel opens, Amina, a middle-aged woman, a sea captain in retirement (or hiding, if you prefer)is attempting a quiet staid life with her aged mother and young daughter. However, she can’t escape her fearsome reputation and adventure comes knocking on her door in the form of a rich,…
Having found the first season of The Witcher forgettable and generic fantasy fare (yes, even with Henry Cavill, I wasn’t planning to read the series. However, Season 2 came around and I was totally drawn into the lives of Geralt, Ciri & Yennefer. I felt invested in the myths, the relationships and this weird, monstrous world and wanted to know more. I started my Witcher journey with The Last Wish, the first novel of this…
Shannon Chakraborty returns to the world of Daevabad with The River of Silver, an anthology of about 15 stories, which continue to add layers and meaning to this political-magical-fantasy series. This is really for the fans of the trilogy, which I highly recommend. With these extra scenes, Shannon gives voice to characters which did not have their own POV in the main series. My personal favorites are the POVs for the Qahtani siblings, Muntadhir and…
Of all the gory stories that swirl around Tower of London, none has quite the intrigue as that of Princes of Towers, pre-teen boys of King Edward V who were allegedly killed by their uncle Richard III. The White Queen is not about them. It’s a novel about their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and the long journey that she makes from an aristocratic nobody to a queen in hiding who never sees her children again. The…
I love historical fiction as a genre because it’s immediately transportive and provides my conscious a good excuse to not read an actual history book. Yes, it’s not the same thing but life is short, and can you blame me for finding a little joy in history-with-a-twist. An ambitious multi-generational saga, Pachinko starts off in an island village in 1903 in Korea where a Hoonie and his wife earn their livelihood by hosting lodgers. When…
As an immigrant parent, I had been looking forward to participating in my son’s education journey through the American public school system. Not only I wanted to revisit math and science, but was curious to see what art, literature, and social sciences mean on this side of the hemisphere. When my son started 3rd grade, I decided to read along the novels they were studying in class. I grew up on steady diet of Enid…
In life, it’s not unusual to have moments when one feels they are losing it. Sometimes these doubts last for a second or sometimes for days. The feeling of losing one’s mind can be a result of stress, anger, nervousness, anticipation, or sometimes you are being just gaslit. And that’s the insecurity that Edith White leans into while building the narrative of her timeless novel The Wheel Spins. Made famous by the Hitchcock movie, “The…
