Sravika's Books - Reviews and Other Trivia

Circe  by Madeline Miller  Genres: Mythology, Fantasy, Fiction,Magical,Mystical, Sorcery, Witchcraft, Imaginative, good prose, 2021-read Rating: 4.5/5  💓💓 Circe is a witch. She spends most of her time collecting, grinding and boiling herbs, precious minerals from soil and casting spells of magic. Madeline Miller has done the same thing in her lovely book. She has poured different elements of mythology, history, fantasy, suspense and imagination into a giant couldron and prepared a savory concoction - with an occassional bitter taste. Ha ha ha 😂😂😂😂  I doubt if I could call this book the regular things - like "amazing", "gripping". I think more apt terms would be "amusing","interesting","magical". It's loosely based on multiple Greek mythology stories balancing them on one pivotal point,Circe. At the backdrop of it, we have a woman, a goddess,a nymph who comes into her own power after being treated worthless for a long time. Anc...

The Last Thing He Told Me  by Laura Dave (2021) Genres: Mystery, Suspense, Psychological Fiction, Female Centered, 2021-read Rating: 3.5/5 👼👼 I finish off this book with a sense of warmth and gratitude in my heart. I started this book yesterday and couldn't put it down - even after the plot veers off into an area I thought could get disappointing. But ofcourse, it didn't. :) I thoroughly enjoyed both the explicable and the inexplicable aspects to the narrator's personality and her sometimes irrational actions. She put pure love and selflessness as her shield to get her and her ward (her step daughter put into her care) through a very difficult - if not impossible - situation. I hesitated to give this a 5-pointer because of some plot holes I felt are too glaring to ignore and of which I will mention shortly.  A little background into the story. The narrator of the story Hannah is nearing 40 years and is a wood turner(means a "carpenter" - she designs and makes fu...

 Dark Matter  by Blake Crouch  Genres : Science Fiction, Thriller, Parallel universes, suspense, gruesome, romance, alternative worlds, 2021-read, thought-provoking,good-twist Rating : 5/5 ✌👍 Fun, super fun, exhilarating, mind bending/head spinning and absolutely unpredictable!!!  I am feeling a little shaky as I write this - with a mixture of  excitement and fear at what I just concluded reading. This is absolutely one of the most imaginative, mind blowing sci-fi stories of all time - no doubt!  What Blake Crouch conceived in his head and put onto the paper for us to read is like nothing I had tasted  before.🙏😋 Its awesome and rich enough to tingle all my nerve centers of thought in brain. 💗  We all know of the three dimensional world we live in, the three dimensions x,y,z and also of a fourth called 'time' - which is not that hard to grasp. But physicists and proponents of Quantum mechanics suggest that there exists a fifth dimension - the s...

11/22/63  By Stephen King (2011)  Genre : Historical fiction,thriller, science fiction,time travel, horror, suspense,alternate reality,romance , 2021-read,big book, dystopian Rating 5/5 😍🥳 Stephen King - everyone knows is a genius with words. He has written a ton of books of which I had read a handful and liked them very much - but I say with conviction that this book is the best of all I had read. It's a blend of all elements that make up fiction. It's bone chilling,tenseful,fastastic, unputdownable - but  also  prompt to give nightmares to those that can't quite put it out of their mind. But still, I think Stephen King managed to infuse subtle - but certain - humor into this macabre and desolate story about a hanging-in-the-distance  bleak, dystopian future. 🤗 Coming to the story, Al Templeton is a cook at a diner and he finds this portal/"rabbit hole" that could transport him to a different time in the past. Precisely to a specific date and time in the yea...

Sooley  By John Grisham    Rating 5/5 No wonder its a New York Times best seller - I think John Grisham consistently features year after year in the lists of best sellers nationally.  This is one gem of a book! Profoundly moving and touching on a very deep level. I have read a few - popular - previous works of John Grisham but didn't know he could handle  emotional stuff with such flair and without overdoing it. Reading it made me appreciate life more and learn that while some use their talents to reap benefits for themselves - others become beacons of help to larger sections of humanity. Sooley falls into the second group.  Sooley is a good kid. He is truly a role model material. He is seventeen years of age and is from Lotta, a small village in South Sudan. He is ever growing and is way over 6 foot 2 when chosen to play in basketball showcase tournaments in USA by scout Ecko Lam. South Sudan has always been ravaged by wars and pillaging by rebels who can'...

Klara and the Sun  By Kazuo Ishiguro   Rating 5/5  I am enthralled for once to read the positive impact AI could have on the world - because most of the books I read portray them as this formidable "black box" things which are unknown and hence must be feared. But Kazuo Ishiguro writes this brilliant story with a tone of mystery and suspense that he had me hanging onto every word till the end and keep hoping against hope that what comes next wouldn't be something bad. There is a sensory build up of something dangerous/untoward about to happen through out the narrative - but this is actually a story of impossibly hopeless and selflessly unconditional love - between a human girl and her AF - Artificial Friend, an agent of the artificial intelligence (a robot, silly! 🤣🤣) Klara.  Getting into the story a bit. Klara is a version B2 AI model that is put up for sale in a store so that children could choose her and make her their friend/partner. She is not like all the oth...

A Children's Bible  By Lydia Millet  A National Book Award finalist 2020  Genre: Sci-fi, Dystopian Future, Thriller,2021-read, Dark, children-fiction          Rating 3/5 A very average read. This story is a peek into a plausible and possibly realistic future for humanity where global warming and other factors lead to a complete collapse of environmental balance/functioning. It signals an end to the human race/existing species while hoping for the rise of newer populations that could survive the conditions.  A bunch of kids and their parents move to a summer resort for the vacation. The strained quality of relationship between parents and children is evident in the narrator's outright contempt and hatred  towards the parents - they blame the parents for not doing their "part"/"duty" which resulted in the current state of their world - meaning I believe chaos, climate change etc. The parents on their turn are shown to be self indulgent, he...

The Turn of the Screw  By Henry James (1898, 19th century)  Genre: Classics, Horror, Suspense, Gothic,2021-read       Rating 4/5 Terrific story! The only drawback being the style of writing - which is quaint (perhaps expected given the time of writing) and not easy to follow. There were a few sentences I had to read multiple times to make sense of what the narrator is trying to convey - which delayed the speed of my read. But otherwise, I think it's a story worthy of a 'classic' - especially "the ending" - I didn't see it coming. It bowled me over with an unexpected punch in the gut.  The story goes thus. A young woman applies for a job and gets appointed as the governess/caretaker of two kids by a handsome, rich man. They are his brother's children and are orphans in his care. Being a hedonist and carefree man, he wanted to layoff his burden on to someone else more capable. She arrives at her new mansion with many hopes and a stout desire to please her em...

The Ocean at the end of the Lane by Neil Gaiman Tags: Mysticism, Magical realism, fiction, horror, fantasy, alternate world, dark fantasy, good prose, 2021-read Rating 5/5 😍 I loved this book so much! I am so grateful to authors like Neil Gaiman who don't seem to really inhabit - atleast in their heads - the same droll and mundane world that we do. They live in fantastic universes constituting magical creatures that are both good and evil. His prose is a flowing river that sweeps and consumes  it's reader away into the world it's creating. I liked to inhabit it so much and didn't want to come out that I read the book  "cover to cover" - not even stopping at the acknowledgements page as I usually do. 🙃🙃 The narrator of the story is a small boy of age seven whose life is forever changed when unusual things start happening in his neighborhood. People get money out of nowhere and there are also unexplained suicides,murders and other unpleasant events. A black m...