REVIEW: The Wrath and The Dawn - Renee Ahdieh

My cheeks are pink and raw. My hand stings from all the slapping my cheeks endured. I catch sight of my roommates as they exchange worried glances at my increased tendencies to inflict harm upon self while reading this book.

I have not learnt my lesson and never will. A book’s ranking in my TBR list is still highly influenced by the book’s performance evaluated using standards defined by the mass. Which is why I picked up this book when I found space to breathe in between my exams, since everyone can’t stop flailing about it. And once I started reading it, promptly started faulting with it.
I avoid hate-reading as much as I can. But if everyone is swooning around the book, and I’m not, I stick around till the very end to see if the book redeems itself and if magically I’ll love the book too.

That didn’t happen here.

WARNING: Proceed with caution. I won’t spoil the potential reader; but once I start, it is difficult to contain my vehemence and fury at being scammed. Also, this is a 1000+ words review, sorry.

I am a sucker for the writing style. Disappoint me and the poor book will have incurred my wrath. I started out by liking the way the story was writing itself. About a chapter in, I quickly revised my assessment. The writing is annoyingly repetitive. The reader is kept entertained with regular weather reports and the menu cards for every meal. I go weak in the knees for books that employ a cinematic approach to the story which was why I laboured under the delusion I will like this one as well, since it has a similar objective but tragically fails at fulfilling it. The book didn’t have a cinematic writing mood – it was over-the-top dramatic and too pretentious for my taste. I felt like I was watching a fucking Bollywood movie; one in which everything happens in slow-motion, moral dilemmas are stretched on for hours, doors (both physical and emotional) are slammed when the central character wants a theatrical exit and lovers quarrel. In addition, no one is allowed to question the soundness of the plot, you just go along with the ebb and tide of it.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t do that.

Humour me and engage in a little method-acting. Imagine your inseparable friend of many years is the last victim after so many girls have been killed with no explanation by a guy you know nothing about. After wading through denial and recurring nightmares, the justifiable anger compels you to take revenge.

You decide to destroy him.

What do you do? Probably start with collecting as much information as possible about your mark. If your mark is the Caliph of a country, you will have to extend your research to the people he is around with. Draft plans A, B and C. Decide to get close to him and then hit him at his weakest.

You want to hear Shahrzad’s A Thousand and One Nights - inspired plan? Volunteer herself as the next bride to be killed, wait for the Caliph to come to her at night, charm him with her wit and storytelling prowess and then if he lets her live, then research him and when the opportunity presents itself, kill him.

Notice any flaws?

This book would not have happened if Khalid hadn’t come to meet her on the night of her wedding, because she didn’t have Plan B. And somehow the notion that cliff-hangers can postpone a scheduled execution is a bit ludicrous. But then, miracle of miracles, the Caliph decides she’s the one to break the cycle. (I distinctly remember muffling a scream with my pillow at that point.) Then she gets a tour of the palace, courtesy of a snarky handmaiden, and she gets shocked at the security and wonders at the strength of her “plan”.

No seriously, Shazi, what did you expect to see? The King of kings living alone in a gilded palace, waiting to present his head to you on a platter?

That’s not all she’s shocked by.

“He’s the second-best swordsman in all of Khorasan? Well, damn, I didn’t cover that in my background check of him. Oh wait. I didn’t do one.”

Shahrzad is infuriating. She pretends to want archery tuitions and then promptly shoots an arrow like a pro. The next second she starts cursing herself for her “stupidity” and I’m left agape. When a particularly life-threatening episode happened, she rants against the Caliph and throws quite a tantrum. I mean, she’s literally outstaying her welcome and her life was a gift and she acted like it was a breach of trust that warranted Khalid the Where-Were-You-When-I-Was Dying interrogation. He’s still your best friend’s killer, isn’t he?

Guurl, you wanna know how to kill someone? Lemme show you how that's done.

Which brings me to my next point. We are supposed to love Shiva, the best friend mentioned above – no questions asked. No interspersed flashbacks. No nightmares. Just a lot of “Shiva, I will kill this man for you” and “Shiva, what do I do” and “Shiva, give me strength to withstand this inexplicable attraction to your killer” and other timed Shiva-tagged self-reminders that she should hate Khalid. She keeps obsessing about her “plan” for revenge half the time, and the other half is spent asking herself not to end up kissing the murderer. No actual murder attempts take place.

That’s just it. How do you fall in love with your best friend’s murderer? I’d expected answers to this question, not be left more flabbergasted than ever. This is where I admire Marie Lu with her Legend series. There, a similar quandary of a reverse nature was engineered. Boy and Girl fall in love. Boy later finds out that Girl (indirectly) was responsible for his mother’s death. He still loves her, but both realize they can’t be together. Now, that was a book.

Well, obviously Shazi is battling with the Stockholm Syndrome – a condition worsened by the fact that the Beast is not a beast (physically or otherwise) and handsome as hell to boot. With a tragic past that is often hinted at. With so many secrets. Our Shazi, pleads him to open his door so that she may see what it is that makes him a monster. “I know nothing because you fight me every step of the way”, she says. Again, dead best friend issues are kept on hold. Not even that matters when you realize all killers aren’t the heartless monsters they are generally portrayed as – that have a story too.

And then the "kiss that changes everything" happens.

Khalid is no better off – being the poor, tortured soul that he is. The book has a third person narration and Khalid gets a solitary paragraph written from his perspective, just in time to venerate “the plague of a girl” that is destroying him. I also hate him for deciding to come see Shazi that night and never before for another bride. Had he done this earlier, who knows, he may have fallen in love with another girl and the murders could have stopped way back.

The one thing that nagged at me was the frequency with which Shahrzad’s skills at seduction came into use. I personally despise characters that use sex as a weapon to wound and open up the enemy – I find that weak and underhanded. Not to mention how that strategy would fail would for us poor unglamorous mortals. Although she immediately regrets it afterwards, the fact that she did it was the last straw for me.

The plot of this book is a love story. How Inexplicable Attraction To A Murderer With A Tragic Past can change everything. I don’t mind love being a deux ex machina element in the story – I do believe love has its own magic – but this was a bit too much.
Oh and wait, did I mention a tragic love triangle involved for the sake of?

I would be doing an injustice if I didn’t commend the research that went into the world building, especially the Persian/Urdu words that cropped up like a pleasant surprise. Khorasan is a Persian land and I’ve always had a special fascination for that place ever since I became a fan of Arabian tales. I also do like the other characters – Despina’s sassiness, Jalal’s protectiveness, and another character who I started to really like and had so much scope for development and then gets killed. Three cheers to me.

I am glad though that my resolution to keep calm and carry on reading till the end of the book paid off marginally. I feel like the main plot of the series is just beginning and I like that plot. Not this soppy, messy love story that I had to endure. Usually, in the kind of series that I binge-read, people run for their lives and they fall in love sometime in between. In this one though, they fall in love first and then run for their lives.

VERDICT: 2 stars.

Posted via Blogaway

ARC REVIEW: The Merit Birds - Kelley Powell

*COURTESY OF PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY*

 Eighteen-year-old Cam Scott is angry. He's angry about his absent dad, he's angry about being angry, and he's angry that he has had to give up his Ottawa basketball team to follow his mom to her new job in Vientiane, Laos. However, Cam's anger begins to melt under the Southeast Asian sun as he finds friendship with his neighbour, Somchai, and gradually falls in love with Nok, who teaches him about building merit, or karma, by doing good deeds, such as purchasing caged "merit birds." Tragedy strikes and Cam finds himself falsely accused of a crime. His freedom depends on a person he's never met. A person who knows that the only way to restore his merit is to confess. "The Merit Birds" blends action and suspense and humour in a far-off land where things seem so different, yet deep down are so much the same.

This is my fourth attempt at an introductory paragraph for this post. I am literally clueless about where to start. Should I begin with how impressed I was with the writing? How Powell was able to capture that which makes us all human and encase it with words, plop them down in circumstances we possibly couldn’t understand, slap them with some names and introduce them to us as her characters? How, towards the end, this book became something larger, something much beyond what I expected?

(I can hear the fridge humming as I sit and stare at the blinking cursor that seems to mock at the sudden deficiency of my virtual loquacity. No, seriously, what has happened to me? There is every possibility that it’s because it’s been inexcusably long since I last wrote anything resembling a book review. That said, I’ll still shamelessly throw in my regular excuse: college life is screwing with me.)

I have read books set in places, casting people geographically, ethnically, and culturally contrasting to the author’s. While most of them treaded upon that road which was less travelled by, they did so with a sense of caution. They knew how they were susceptible to errata, and how they could multiply in terms of consequence, however meticulous their data collection might have been. And so the tragedy remained that the audience could never fully get under the layers of the characters. Books starring POC characters became the sort of thing that you had on GR shelves labelled POC and as a bullet point in Diversity In Books campaigns. This book is that rare book that goes the whole way FLAWLESSLY. I won’t pretend I know the mechanics of how Laos and its people run (I don’t) – but I could immediately relate to the characters, being Asian myself.  How Seng was fascinated by America – land of the rich, home of Hollywood. Or the picture of it in his mind. How the locals immediately resorted to head-shaking and frowning when they see a boy and a girl together. How Lao guys don’t think too much before throwing an arm around another guy’s neck. How two members of a family don’t see shame in sharing a bed together. How an individual puts his family before himself. How they can’t understand why the white-skinned people would dry-wipe their asses after having a crap. All little things, especially in the way these facts are thrown in the readers’ faces like a careless inconsequential detail. But they went a long way in defining those tricky edges of the characters.

This book teems with life. There is that boy who’s dealing with culture shock – starting with the fact that he has to shit into a hole in the ground. Like he already doesn’t have enough to deal with – anger management issues, mom issues, dad issues and homesickness. There is that girl that survives alone through all the shit life throws at her and becomes guarded to the point that she shies away from the possibility of love. There is her older brother who feels the weight of the title as the head of the family after being abandoned repeatedly – first by his parents, then his older sister. A weight further amplified by the sense of his failure in the same. Khamdeng with his loyalty. Somchai with his capacity to love. Sai with his wisdom and patience. Julia with all her sins. All merit birds. The victory of this book is that it tries to get under all the layers of most of the characters – including the ones skulking on the periphery of the main plot.

At first, I didn’t get why only Cam got a first-person. I mean, this story is as much as Seng’s and Nok’s as his, right? But then Somchai rebukes Cam for thinking only about himself, contrary to the Lao and I realized that might be it. That’s when I got my hint this story was on its way to evolving into something more.

Yes, by that I’m implying that I judged this book. It had every promise of turning into a love story spanning across borders of all sorts – and then suddenly it was not just that. In fact, somewhere around the middle I desperately wished it had stopped at a love story. At first, the plot steadily climbed the plot hill at a measured pace and then things crashed and burned. Spontaneously combusted. And I was the sole survivor – left to collect the pieces and make sense of it. That was the thing I disliked the most about this book – the incredulous rapidity with which a series of unfortunate events unfolded. The middle was the lowest point of the book – the peak of the plot hill felt staged.

Despite that and other minor failings, this book is a must read for all those who scream blood for diversity in books. This is a book that you should read at least twice – first to read the lines, second to read between them. 

VERDICT: 4 STARS

Confessions of a K-Dramaholic

Hold your judgements, people. Before you snort in disgust at my apparent two-facedness (since I seemingly can’t stand romantic literature but you’re still seeing this post), allow me to explain.

You might have noticed the disturbing gap between my last post and this one when I promised you in November that my winter break was going to up this space’s tempo. That didn’t happen, because, er, sometimes even after you’ve finished off a TV series marathon, you can’t get closure, so you fast forward through it again – probably by using hostages to explain to your parental authorities that you’re merely stuck in front of your laptop because your hostage made you watch it with her. Definitely not the other way round. Naturally, my TBR pile got bigger (because, I can’t resist buying books with BUY 2 GET 1 FREE stickers) and my e-ARCs are pushing themselves to their expiry date. My roommates were disgusted by what they saw; my parents let their jaws drop when they caught me making soppy eyes at the screen when the actors touched lips for a long time with music playing in the background (HOW IS THAT CALLED KISSING I WANT TO KNOW) and I decided I needed to explain WHY. (To myself, first and foremost.) And I also, uh, needed a post ASAP.

CONS:

• Okay. So the dialogues are cheesy. Extremely. But I am fully prepared to accept that it might be because of the translation problems. In order to fully understand this issue, I thought of translating popular Hindi and Malayalam songs (which are pure poetry) into English in my head and that exercise killed me. Because poetry in Malayalam = Cheesiness in English. Same problems, maybe? But there all lots of little phrases of wisdom peppered throughout and some one-liners that made me roll around laughing, clutching my belly.
• And the drama is extravagantly so. Yes, that’s there. I felt like pulling out my hair every time a new iceberg kept cropping up to drive my ship apart. The money-driven mother, the obsessed fiancé, the random admirer, the jealousy and self-sacrifice involved in all of the above, was just too much on my nerves. I know it’s going to be a happy ending, so can you get there already?

PROS:

• ALL THE GUYS

(Insert a heartbreakingly huge sigh here) I mean. Just look at them. Even the supporting actors. And the villains. They do look … not as manly as I would have liked, but they’re still so. I mean. Uh. Um.

WHERE DO YOU GUYS COME FROM?

HOW DARE YOU SHOW YOUR PRETTY FACE HERE?

• The Badass Heroines

I don’t care if they use stunt-doubles. I really don’t. It’s the character they portray that matters. All of Geum Jan Di’s roundhouse kicks made my eyes bulge out in envy. Her sarcasm and yelling. Who knew walking, talking death threats could be so cute too?

Cha Eun Sang’s altruistic talents. Her penchant for issuing empty threats.

Park Gae In: Weirdness. Obtuseness. Fierce Friend Protector. And her enviable ability to eat anything, anywhere, anytime.

Kim Na Na’s jealousy. Her taking responsibility for her own feelings. Her survival skills, both emotionally and otherwise. And man, can she shoot an outlaw.

• THE MUSIC

The hero and the heroine have a theme song to themselves. The anti-hero or the third corner of the love triangle has one for every time he looks at the girl. One for the girl lost in thought. One for every time the male corners of the triangle fight. One when something ominous is going to happen. And they are all so good, man.

• The Direction and The Camera

Just like how the writing style of a book determines whether or not I like the plot, the director’s abilities clinches it for me. The very strategically inserted flashbacks (yes, sometimes, they do go overboard with it). The nightmares whenever the hero is stuck at a crossroads. How they include the weather elements like the sun, snow and wind for the emotional scenes. The STUNTS, man. And I simply can’t resist making wallpapers out of my screenshots every time.

• The Bloopers

Okay. Yes, I’m cheating with this absolutely unnecessary plus point. It doesn’t hurt at all to watch them, though.

I just needed to use this GIF somewhere

Sunday Swoons (or The One With All The Colourful Ships)

Yes, I am –

a) Alive

b) Aware that today isn’t a Sunday

c) Fully conscious of the fact that this post was supposed to have happened two weeks back

By Skylar Finn 

If you didn't know already, Sunday Swoons is the weekly feature where Skylar @ Life of a Random and Briana @ Reader, Writer, Critic talk about normal swoon-y stuff everyone can relate to.

But Briana and Skylar were very understanding (for which they have earned mountains of virtual chocolate) and extended the deadline for linking this sorry too-late post of mine. But surprisingly I had a lot to talk about this – Diversity in Literary Relationships.

While Skylar tackled diversity in races and Briana talked about diversity in religions – (which you should totally read) I am going to mix it up.

There aren’t that many books that I can claim to have read which feature diverse relationships. These are some books that feature ships in international waters but don’t have their love life as the plot –

1) The Legend series – Marie Lu

Marie Lu did an amazing thing with the ethnicity of The Republic. She says that since it is set in a post-apocalyptic world, people should have mixed ethnicity. While Day is dominantly Mongolian, June is a mix of Native and others.

2) Heroes of Olympus – Rick Riordan

LEO AND CALYPSO. JASON AND PIPER. (And if Miss J is to be believed – NICO AND WILL)

3) The Kane Chronicles – Rick Riordan

CARTER AND ZARA. SADIE AND ANUBIS (who happens to be the Egyptian god of death with kohl-rimmed eyes and if author is to be believed DROP DEAD GORGEOUS AND HKUSFSIGFAZADSEY)

4) The Mediator series – Meg Cabot

JESSE AND SUZE. SUZE AND JESSE. JESSE AND SUZE. JESSE AND ME SUZE.

These ships do go into their diverse backgrounds, but it is not the case in point –

1) Prisoner of Night and Fog – Anne Blankman

Gretchen Muller is German and Daniel Cohen is Jewish. Throw them against the backdrop of the Third Reich and you get your plot.

2) The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd

Lily and Zachary Lincoln Taylor - they are so made for each other – with all the hurt and anger inside and out – and you’re like - 

And you sigh when they finally do.

3) Eleanor and Park – Rainbow Rowell

There’s your diversity – right there in the title.

4) Ghosting – Edith Pattou

Anil’s girlfriend is the Official Most Beautiful. And he is still surprised by that fact. But then he meets Max with her camera and shyness and he is unsure about how to proceed along those lines. He also talks about the kind of expectations he has to meet, courtesy of his family of doctors. Then tragedy (aka the plot point) strikes and … I’m not telling anymore.

Now I’m not going into explicit detail, but here’s the deal – short and sweet. Here, where I live, when you marry a person, you marry his/her entire family as well. You aren’t allowed to date, have any sort of romantic relationship, live under the same roof before marriage (society hyperventilates around that sort of talk), or divorce – marry – repeat. Your parents fix the deal for you – with which you can agree or disagree. Obviously, DIVERSITY IS A HUGE NO – NO. (There are a lot of pros and cons with this and I am NOT going to talk about it – I just set the scene here). I can predict winds of change brewing though. Slow but sure enough.

Now we all know what happened to Adam and Eve and the biblical forbidden apple.  This Forbidden Apple Syndrome has reflected a lot in Indian literature (but even more so in Indian cinema, especially for hormone-driven teens) so there’s no shortage of diverse couples (or as diverse it’s practically possible). Here are some examples (that I have read) with links to their Goodreads blurbs -

• How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life - Kavya Viswanthan
• 2 States - Chetan Bhagat                      
• The Inheritance of Loss – Kiran Desai
• Bend it like Beckham – Narinder Dhami (YOU’VE SEEN THE MOVIE RIGHT? JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS)

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(Crap, I can’t think of anything else. Since my knowledge in general chick-lit and Indian –English lit is limited, I have failed in compiling a trustworthy list. )

This post has gotten absurdly long. I’m stopping.

What do you think? All those in favour of more colourful ships? 

Saving The Dreams Of Rainbow Coloured Kids

In an earlier post I confessed something about POCs and MCs in books. This is what I said, verbatim: “No, I don’t care that there is a severe lack of POCs as MCs.”

I need to explain.

NovelSounds posted on the vacuum in the book industry we have because there is a very limited variety of books wherein a POC character is the MC. I read this post among the recent slew of posts I read as part of the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign.
It was when I commented on that post that things fell together about how exactly I feel on this subject.

Where I live, the number of people who read as (ir)regularly as me can be counted on one hand. The concept of Teen/YA literature for them is limited to even fewer number of books written by Indian authors in English about family - forbidden romances against the backdrop of an engineering/medical college. For someone who cannot stand such repetitive stories, such as yours truly, I turned to American/British/Australian publishers.

As a result of my current bookshelf and movie favourites, I know the Miranda rights by heart; I know what constitutes the American breakfast, I can identify bridges and train stations in London, I have an Indian accent but my vocabulary consists of both British English and American words (even though I’m supposed to technically be a “Borrowed English” speaker), I know what to do in the event of a zombie apocalypse, I can recognize an Australian accent; and I don’t find gorgeous enough guys here, thanks to Spanish guys like Jesse from The Mediator series and gay guys like Neal Caffrey (ugh, Matt Bomer you twit). I don’t even appreciate the glamour of the “moochi” (moustache) Indian guys have here.

Hush, don’t tell. Not that I’m breaking any hearts anyway.

The worst part: When I replace myself as Katniss in my dreams, I’m white. Not the Indian version of Katniss the reasonable/indignant/conscious part of my brain would say I’m supposed to be.

There was a reason why I said I didn’t care much about the lack of POC characters. I know, when I’m picking up a book, it’s going to take place somewhere in Seattle, or London, or other places I’ve never been to. So I know I can’t expect people to eat chapattis for dinner, or have their parents fix their life partners for them. I know it isn’t fair to ask J. K. Rowling to make Ron black and Hermione Hispanic, in the name of diversity when they’re people she dreamt up. You can’t give birth to characters whose ethnicity you’re not too familiar with. What if you inadvertently do them wrong?

Then there are the POC writers themselves. Some of them don’t want to cast POC MCs because it would make them look like narrow-minded people. So the only way we can have POC MCs if they come alive in the writers’ heads of their own need to save the world.   I personally don’t want to read books for which writers sat and scribbled bios of their characters THEY WANTED TO HAVE instead of characters THEY NEEDED TO HAVE. As in “I want my heroine to be named so-so, she should have freckles, and green eyes, and short red hair”, vis-à-vis - “this boy came in my dream last night – I wanted to know his story.” Psychology can tell us that when this happens it’s usually a character of our own ethnicity. How could I blame white writers for casting white characters? Should I blame a black writer for not casting a Japanese protagonist? Hence, the second sentence of this post.

Look at me. I’m telling people how a character should evolve when I’ve written – hang on, let me count – ZERO books.

*pauses a moment to strangle yours truly*

That said, I don’t want my kid cousins to think America is full of only beautiful white girls. I don’t want my sister to think black boys can never be a Marvel superhero, only a sidekick. I don’t want myself to have crushes on only the white guys with a spare upper lip and brown messed up hair because they look so dang good in tuxes brandishing an FBI badge.

I totally worship Marie Lu for what she did. She did a tumblr on her inspiration for casting Day as a Mongolian kid (not fully, more of a mixture of different races). She also said that since the Legend series took place in a dystopian universe, instead of ethnic segregation, she chose wealth segregation. That’s logical. Therefore, you can find her book filled with characters of so many different ethnicities that it’s beautiful.

Another confession:
I want to write a book someday. I have never been to the US or anywhere else. Do I set my story in Dubai where I grew up? Or India where I’m living now? If I do, I can guarantee that my audience will be limited as well. Most writers have to confront this problem to write in the first place. You probably haven’t have heard of the Shiva trilogy which is a bestselling series here. I have read of teenaged writers who WROTE UNDER PEN-NAMES so that the book has an international market. There are books featuring POC characters but because the international bookish population can’t relate to them, they come and go like a breeze and gather dust on shelves in their home bookstores.

This is what I have to say: We need diverse books. Period. But diverse books can’t thrive on “diverse” readers alone. Books need to be read by everyone, diverse or not. It’s not that hard for me to get into the head of a white kid even if I sometimes simply do not get American high school and teen pregnancies. Similarly, it’s not that hard for the “default kind of reader” to get into the head of a Filipino kid saving the world.
Readers, Publishers, Writers, save the world. Maybe necessarily in that order.