Sravika's Books - Reviews and Other Trivia

The Midnight Palace  By Carlos Ruiz Zafon  Rating 2/5 I 🤐 Genre : Calcutta, Fantasy, Fiction  I know that coming from me this is a low rating but this book just read plain silly! This is a bunch of extraordinary stuff pulled together and strung into a meaningless story that just sounds ridiculous. I am sure that this is not one of the best works of Zafon who is a masterful and splendid writer! Though the main characters are juvenile and teenagers, they exude an aura of adulthood and behave totally like kids - this in my opinion indicates poor characterization. My question here i guess is why did Zafon even feel the need/drive to write such a stupid book?!  Anyways, brief overview of the story. A bunch of orphan kids - seven in number - grow up together in an orphange and when they turn sixteen they get to enter the world as free adults. The background is Calcutta but the characters are named Ben, Kylian,Ian etc which don't seem to be Indian/H...

The Fifth Season  By N.K.Jemesin  Rating 5/5 💜💚 Genres : Epic Fantasy, New world This book is so unexpected and new in its creativity and imagination that I had to re-read some of the early passages to understand what they are referring to. She has created not only a new world that is highly unstable because of the turbulences taking place under the earth but also new sets of people with mysterious powers to quell these disturbances or create new ones and others who are pursuing them either to punish or kill them. Its a highly engrossing and enriching read!  A girl Damaya is born as an Orogene(rogga) - someone with power to bring earth quakes or quell them. She is given away as a child to be trained at a university called Fulcrum - to use her power consciously without misusing it. She grows into adulthood and is sent on a mission to quell an earth quake with a man alabaster who is much more powerful than her. Their story takes unexpected turns as they go aga...

Gir,Women,Other  By Bernardine Evaristo  Rating : 2.5/5 Genres : women's fiction, black women. I guess this will be the first book that I have given a higher than intended rating(I guess a negative 5) because the writing and narration are too good - only i feel disgusted having completed this. Not even all the sexual explicitness of Haruki Murakami's writing ever evoked such strong emotions and feelings of nausea in me. Reading this shows how thoroughly damaged and messed up this world is! Either there are a lot of disgusting things really happening in the world to women or just black women are beacons attracting such unfortunate circumstances. Like nothing good ever happens in the life of a black person,can this be true? The author tells the stories of multiple women..their daughters..their mothers from different perspectives.. but its the same story everywhere.  Someone is a lesbian with numerous girlfriends and has a daughter with a gay man.. someone else i...

Fingersmith  By Sarah Waters  Rating 5/5  Genres : Historical Fiction, Romance, Lesbian love, Suspense, Twisted Tale Multiple twists in the story make it quite suspenseful and put me on the edge - especially as it drew towards the end. Although it has elements of lesbian romance and love, I didn't find it getting too deep, going into the zone of gross/uncomfortable. What the author tried to portray is true/selfless love between two girls who are forced into plotting against each other by circumstances and their desire to gain some vile objective. But the pursuit of this vileness hasn't smeared their love - only edified it because of how easily they sacrifice it.  The scenes in the madhouse has me shocked and reeling at the absurdity of it all - how easily a woman could get committed to a madhouse and not see the outside world forever if her husband chooses so - during the times the book is set up in. The more truthful the committed patient tries to be, th...

Notes on an Execution  By Danya Kukafka  Rating : 4.5/5  Genres : Execution, Murder Trial, Novel, 2022-read I am very impressed with the crisp and short handed writing style of the author. This happens to be her second work and it doesn't feel amateurish at all. The plot is well developed and presented from different perspectives/angles with the narrative flying back and forth in time and space. The question mainly addressed is about choices a soul/person makes - what if one has no control over them and the person who does bad things yearns for a different reality where he is good, his life was good and he didn't have to bear the guilt of his impulsive actions? We should ask ourselves if we really want to punish a child for the mistakes his parents did and his future actions/behavior/violence is a product of such abuse which happened to him when he had no say/control over it?  Told from the point of the murderer who desperately wants to escape execution a...

Norwegian Wood  By Haruki Murakami  Rating : 3/5  Genres : Romance, Mental illness, Japanese, Literary Fiction. This happens to be one of the most read novels by Haruki Murakami. It literally lifted him from shadows of obscurity into international stardom.  In this book, he creates a world in itself. He has interleaved elements of love, friendship,hope with those of selfishness, melancholy, depression and shock. This is my second book by him and I guess I will always have a bit of discomfort with his explicit sexual descriptions but he also makes them  very center stage to his stories that without them the depth of his narration will fall apart. Like all his other works i read, this one is gripping and gives a totally immersive reading experience. The main figures in this book are teenagers who are coming to terms with loss/death of their dear ones and their ability to handle the pain without falling apart. The important lesson to take away from this...

The Old Man and the Sea By Ernst Hemingway  Rating 4.75/5  Genres : Literary Fiction, Award Winning, 2022-read  An old man has been a successful and well known fisherman most of his life. He hasn't been having much luck of late and is despondent as a result. After about three months of no catch, the old man sets off on his hunt skeptical of catching anything. But this time something unexpected happens. He thinks a regular fish has caught his bait but doesn't know how big a fish it is until it drags the boat a long way into the sea and then starts circling around to get to him. Determined to capture it and sell it for a huge profit, the old man spears it in the chest and kills it. He ties it to a skiff of his boat and start his journey back.  The blood which is spilled during the killing attracts many sharks from the depths of the sea. The first one to attack is a Mono shark and he loses his harpoon killing it. The second is a set of shovel nosed sharks an...