Book Review
Review of books I have read
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The second Fictional Hearts book sends Brynn through Charlotte’s portal and into a world that seems too good to be true.
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Nine Bollywood movies with twins, from Ram Aur Shyam to Kaminey — double role classics, mistaken identities, and why Hindi cinema cannot let this trope go.
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Avanthika wakes with retrograde amnesia and has to rebuild her life out of other people’s testimony. An identity with no supporting evidence. A psychological thriller read through a risk lens.
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A family moves cities to start again, and a girl alone in a bedroom becomes the cost of it. Jami Worthington’s The Valley is less interested in its killer than in the twenty-five years that follow — and that, mostly, is to its credit.
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A Sultan falls in love with a commoner, and the kingdom pays for it. Malathi Ramachandran’s Mandu is the story of Roopmati and Baz Bahadur, set in sixteenth-century Malwa — historical fiction with a beating heart. 5/5.
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Three estranged siblings are pulled back into the same house when one of their sons goes missing. Rohini Paranjpe Sathe’s The Music Makers is a tender, unflinching novel about patriarchy, buried dreams and the music that survives a family’s silence.
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A rom-com writer wakes to find herself inside her own book, and falls for the very hero she invented. Every trope you expect is here, filed and stamped, yet the self-aware conceit turns each cliché into a knowing smile. My rating: 3.5/5.
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There are thrillers that frighten you with what waits in the dark, and then there are thrillers that frighten you with what smiles at you in the light. Soft Erasure by A.D. Levenson belongs firmly to the second kind and it unsettled me in a way I did not quite expect when I turned the…
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There is something delicious about a murder mystery that opens on a beach at the wrong end of a Greek summer, and Spirits and Whine by Lisa Troy knows exactly what to do with that setting. Sun-bleached, salt-sharp, close enough that everyone knows everyone’s business. The island town becomes a character in its own right,…