Sravika's Books - Reviews and Other Trivia

 Dissolution  By Nicholas Binge Published Year: 2025 Page Count: 384 pages  Medium Used: Kindle Scribe  Genre : Science Fiction, Memory Travel, Time Travel, Time Looping, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Prose, 2025-read.  Rating : 5/5 😀😀😀😀😀 This is a very easy and compulsive 5 pointer story. The prose is so good that I kept reading past the last page into acknowledgements. Despite being a story about time/memory travel and fighting a hungry force of nature, this story felt wholesome and soothing. The deep commitment and enduring love the main characters share over their decades of marriage with each other brought happy tears to my eyes. Even if they have now become old with rickety bones and batty minds, they and their love is something to cherish! So getting into the story. Stanley, Raph and Jacques are three students under a nearly blind, old, eerie professor Waldmen in their university. Stanley comes from a poor background and always felt an outsider i...

 Manacled  By Senlinyu Published Year: 2018-2019 Page Count: 957 pages  Medium Used: Phone  Genre : Romantsy, Romance, High Fantasy, Harry Potter Universe, Alternate Theory, Hermione Granger, Dark Magic and Sorcery, 2025-read.  Rating : 5/5  I have a habit of reading multiple books at a time. This book! This book has knocked me off my mind. I was glued to my phone reading and sticking to this one till the end. Even though this is a long book and had some of the actions mentioned on repeat, - like the multiple times the main characters meet and rescue or heal each other, the many times they spend together as a host and surrogate - it didn't feel boring. I never once said 'enough'. I wanted to keep reading.  This book is so so good. It recounts an alternate version to Harry Potter series. In order to fully understand and follow the book, one must also possess a knowledge - even if only very brief and vague - of the original series. In this book, Hermione...

 Black Sun Rising  (The Coldfire Triology #1) By C. S. Friedman  Published Year: 1991 Page Count: 516 pages  Medium Used: Kindle Scribe  Genre: High Fantasy, Sorcery, Magic, Dark Fantasy, Vampires, Adventure, Action, Horror, 2025-read.  Rating: 5/5 🌟 😎 😀  👌 🌟  Spine tingling. Mind lickingly good! Some of the scenes are so enshrined within my mind - they are incorrigible. I have been reading this book for a while - shuffling/switching among other books and other work - and when I got back to this one, its like I have never left. So uncanny! The world building is great and reminiscent of beautiful, older times fantasy fiction. It brought the world of Erna to life in my mind's eye. The characters are flawed -  they have their reasons and personal motivations for setting out on this adventure but they abide by their promises and oaths - which made them all noble in my eyes.  A priest of the church, Damien, who is also a sorcerer that ca...

 The Incandescent  By Emily Tesh  Published Year: 2025 Page Count: 394 pages  Medium Used: Kindle PW  Genre: Fantasy, Magic, Sorcery, Multiple Planes, Demons, Action, Lesbians, 2025-read.  Rating: 4.75/5  This is my first book by the author and I find her prose good, logic sensible and acceptable. This story revolves around a centuries old Magic school, Chetwood, which houses six hundred students learning and practicing magic, teaching staff and other management. The school is carefully warded against demons that are always on the look out to cross over from a parallel demonic plane and possess objects, eat the enormous amount of magic that is here, all concentrated in one place. Among the people that are keeping the school and students secure is the Director of Magic, Sapphire Walden. She is the protagonist of this story. She is a thoughtful, compassionate teacher and a spectacular magician. She has spent all her career learning how to combat demons a...

 Alchemy of Secrets  (Alchemy of Secrets #1) By Stephenie Garber  Published Year:2025 Page Count: 324 pages  Medium Used: Kindle Scribe  Genre: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Mystery, Adventure, Magic, Young Adult, Mythologies,2025-read.  Rating: 5/5 😄😄😄😄😄✌ Just amazed. I found this so immersive and gripping that I finished about 75 percent of the story in a day. Easily one of the best books to come out this year. Easily one of the best reads for me of all time. It is an alchemy of all the elements I like - dark magic, murder mystery, time loops .. all the twists in the story just had me going wow. It is a fast paced adventure story where the main character has to search and find an Alchemical heart - the most magically powered object in the world. She will die if she doesn't find it by 11.59 pm on Halloween. She has to solve a series of riddles her father has sent down from the past. She teams up with strange guys whom she doesnt know if she can fully trus...

 The Compound by Aisling Rawle Published Year: 2025 Page Count: 315 pages Medium Used: Kindle PW Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Reality TV, Horror, Suspense, Psychological Thriller, 2025-Read. Rating: 4.5/5 Very gripping. Very compelling. I guess what really kept me hooked and what worked out for me is that there is always a hint of danger, of things going out of control with the whole world sitting on its butt and watching, doing nothing, while a bunch of young contestants try to best each other, no matter how far they go, because stakes are high and they don't want to get back to the "real" world where their lives mean boring, exhausting and nothing.  It is a reality TV game which is set up in a desert like setting. The participants are ten boys and ten girls collected from different walks of life. They are given community tasks which all of them must participate in and they are rewarded for them with things they lack like wood, freezer, food and water. Should they fail t...