Tag: reading

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Review: The Turn of The Key

Rating: 3.75 Stars

I will not call this an excellent book, but The Turn of The Key is my favourite one by Ruth Ware to date. I have found Ware to be a good writer who keeps the audience interested while giving the least surprising twists. This book is a bit different because it has more than one twists, and a couple of them are quite good too.

The book starts with a nanny imprisoned for murdering her charge, a little girl, writing to a well known lawyer about how it all came about, and how she is not the one guilty of murder. The book is in the form of a letter, where the nanny is writing about the whole nightmare experience in the first person.

Rowan came across the ad for a nanny by chance. She was intrigued by the ad as well as the unbelievable salary being offered for the post, and decided to apply for it. She expected to be rejected, so when she got the job she was determined to last longer than the other nannies who had ran away before her. Rumour was that the other girls all got spooked by the ghosts living in the house.

Rowan, who is practical and has no time for silly things like ghosts, thought that she was above all this nonsense. However, once she started working at Heatherbrae House, she couldn’t help but be scared by the unexplained things happening to her. The house itself was a technological miracle, with surveillance cameras and smart controls, which seemed to overwhelm her at all points. Add to that, the absence of her employers, and the presence of four girls of varying ages, three of whom were visibly antagonistic towards her, was enough to drive Rowan almost mad.

It didn’t help that Rowan herself was keeping some secrets that made her look quite guilty when they came to light. As she tries to set the record straight, you can’t help but wonder at what really did happen if she is telling the truth.

I admit the book was too boring in the beginning to keep me interested. It was only my determination to finish it that kept me reading on. However, as I read on, I found myself wanting to know how it all came about. I wasn’t expecting a scary book, or even for it to be too unexpected, so I was pleasantly surprised when I read the thrilling bits and was suitably spooked.

This was the first Ruth Ware book I read where the ending wasn’t neat or the matters resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. This just shows that she is getting better at thrills with each book.

A good book, if you can get past the first quarter of it.

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Review: Hijabistan

Rating: 4 Stars

Hijabistan by Sabyn Javeri is a collection of short stories about women, with a common thread of hijab running through all the stories. As a rule, I’m not one for short stories. They always leave me feeling like I missed the point. These short stories just sucked me in and left their mark. It is entirely possible that I might be biased towards this collection.

These stories speak to me personally because I have been through the struggle myself. This push and pull of wearing the hijab or taking it off has been a part of my life for most of last 15 years. Of course, it has never been as hard as it is for most of the protagonists in these stories, but I feel an affinity with most of them. There is no judgement about the garment itself here, just the people who use it as a weapon and those who let their views be coloured by it.

I liked almost all the stories in this collection, even those that might seem far-fetched to people who have no clue about how close to the truth they are. I will not talk about all the stories here, just my most favourite ones.

The Full Stop is about a young girl who gets her first period. It reads like a true story because it is the truth of millions of girls who are taught that menstruation is something to hide, something evil and disgusting. Girls are told that it is something to be ashamed of when they should be told that it is natural and something ordained by nature.

Only in London shows us a girl stuck between two cultures, not knowing which one to call hers. It is the dilemma faced by all immigrants, no matter where they come from. It is not easy to give up your old values and suddenly pick up new ones. When a person migrates to a new place, they inevitably become a mixture of the two, their country of origin, and their country of migration.

The Good Wife has to be my favourite story out of all. It is also the saddest. It tells us of a woman who covers herself because she wants to, who is not afraid of what others think of her, whose faith in her Creator is strong even if her husband’s is not. At the same time this woman loves her husband with everything in her and is not afraid to show her love as well. I was crying for that woman by the end of the story, and trying to make sense of our senseless world at the same time.

The last story, Coach Annie, is the sweetest and most upbeat story of the collection. I loved reading about Annie who has to wear the hijab at a tender age, yet she makes it her own, even when she is surrounded by men double her size. Annie makes me believe that women can do anything they put their minds to, regardless of how they choose to dress.

A great book about women and hijab that needs to be read with an open mind and a big heart.

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Review: The Guilty Wife

Rating: 3 Stars

The Guilty Wife by Elle Croft is the story of Betthany Reston, who loves her husband very much but is also having a secret affair. The affair has to remain absolutely secret because it’s not only Bethany who has a lot to lose. Her secret lover is married, and very famous. So, it is imperative that no one knows about them.

When her lover is murdered, following an argument with her, Bethany has to work very hard at hiding her grief from the world. She thinks she’s succeeding until she finds out that someone knows all her secrets. And, now they’re threatening to expose her as the killer. She knows she’s innocent, but there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. To prove herself innocent, Bethany must now find out who actually killed her lover.

The plot is interesting and the characters believable, except that the book gets increasingly boring as it goes on and on about Bethany’s quest to find the killer. Around the halfway mark, I just wanted to roll my eyes at Bethany and the determination of the writer to give her so many redeeming qualities to offset her audacity to conduct a secret affair!

There is no way to form any kind of opinion about the lover as he is only shown through the eyes of Bethany. The husband comes off as sort of loser in the beginning, and then more of a loser as the story progresses. The lawyer friend is like all lawyer friends in thousands of books that we have read. I began to suspect the killer quite early on in the book, and though I was suspicious of another character, I still bet on the one I first suspected. I was right.

It is unfortunate that we have had so many similar books about murders and mysteries, that there is hardly anything new to find anymore. I like books with twists and crazy endings, but it has to make some sort of sense at least. I would have been happier with the end if there hadn’t been an epilogue. The last chapter was enough to satisfy a thriller buff and maybe for someone to buy its filming rights. The epilogue completely spoiled the book for me, and that’s funny because the epilogue was what I had suspected from the beginning!

An average read that goes on for longer than it should.

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Review: The Death of Mrs. Westaway

Rating: 3.5 Stars

I realize that I’m a bit late to this party, but despite having bought this book back in July 2018, I only just got around to reading it. At first, it was the size that seemed too much to me, and then it was the fact that I wasn’t too impressed with Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game and didn’t want to be disappointed again.

The Death of Mrs. Westaway is more like Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10, though. It is interesting, if predictable, and just fun to read. I mean fun for those who like light mysteries and thrillers.

Harriet “Hal” Westaway is a young Tarot card reader in Brighton, who has gotten into trouble with a loan shark. She is all alone in the world after her mother’s tragic death three years ago. When she gets a letter saying that she her grandmother has left her a bequest, Harriet knows that it’s not true. Her grandparents died more than 20 years ago, and she has no other living relatives that she knows of.

As the loan shark becomes more persistent, Hal decides to pretend to be the real Harriet Westaway, in order to get her hands on the bequest. It is only when she gets to the Cornish estate, that she realizes the pitfalls of the web that she is weaving. There seems to be someone who doesn’t want her around, and is willing to do anything to get rid of her.

Ruth Ware is not too much into suspense and thrills. I have understood that from her previous books. I was able to predict everything almost down to the last detail quite early on in the book. Nevertheless, it is quite gratifying to find that you were right about what will happen all along.

Harriet is a likable character, as are almost all other characters in the book. For once, we see a family who with all their differences possess enough love to want to welcome a long lost relative into their midst. It is a nice change to read about good coming out of the most adverse circumstances, of love and acceptance growing from a childhood of hate and neglect.

I enjoyed reading this book, even though it is too tame and predictable to be a thriller.

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Review: Believe Me

Rating: 4 Stars

When I read J. P. Delaney’s The Girl Before, I thought it was good, except the last part which fell flat for me. I don’t have any such complaints with Believe Me. This is my kind of book, with enough twists and turns, and grey characters to make me happy. This is one of those books that I picked up at an airport, not because I wanted to read it, but because it’s a sin to not buy a book from the airport! I had no idea what it was, and I have never seen a single review for it. Once again, I was so happy to be taken by surprise.

Claire Wright is a British student, some people say an excellent actress, with a problem. She’s studying drama in New York on scholarship, but doesn’t have much money for anything else. She cannot work like other students because she doesn’t have a green card and is not allowed to work off-campus. The only way for her to make ends meet and pay the rent is to work for a law firm, acting like an easy pick up to gather evidence against philandering husbands. Even this stroke of luck seems to be running out as the firm decides to part ways with her.

And then, a client is murdered and her husband, who had been one of Claire’s target, is accused of the crime. The police want Claire to help them catch the killer, and Claire, backed into a corner, agrees. As she plays her part, she begins to fall for the suspected killer, Patrick Fogler, and it dawns on her that things might not be as straight forward as they seem.

With the backdrop of New York, Broadway, theater and drama school, this fast paced thriller goes from one high to another without losing momentum. As soon as you start believing in a character, they give you reason to doubt. Everything that you read seems like a deception. There are no innocents, yet you can’t figure out who’s guilty either. It was a pleasure reading this book, which I managed to finish in less than a day.

Recommended for all fans of thrillers.

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Sunday Blues: Dream House Part Deux

When I wrote the blog post about the house of my dreams I had no idea that I was so close to achieving my dream. We were in the process of moving house around the time that I wrote the post, and all I could think of was how much stuff I needed to get rid of because even though the place was bigger, it has less storage space. My bookshelves have always remained a joke with my husband. He knows how sentimental I feel towards my books, and he’s not above making fun of my attachment.

When we first though about moving, my husband was full of plans to convert the family room downstairs into a gaming/ media room. I thought it was a good idea and accordingly thought up of how I was going to set it all up. I don’t like watching TV and find it hard to concentrate on anything while it is on, even if I’m not watching.

With all this planning going on in my brain, I had no idea what my husband had cooking in his head. The day before we were to start moving our stuff, I asked him which wall he wanted the TV mounted on, and he completely changed his tune! He insisted that he wanted his TV in the living room and nowhere else. I was perplexed by this sudden change in plans and asked him what was I supposed to do with this extra room that would now be useless. He told me to use it for myself and do what I really wanted to do with it in the first place.

I didn’t even get time to think things through before I was directing all the bookshelves into this room. As a result, all our bedrooms got a bit more spacious, and we managed to get all the books in one room.

This is how my dream came true and I got a study in my house. As a thank you to my husband, I fixed up his foosball table in the study too!

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Review: Pieces of Her

Rating: 3 StarsPieces of Her by Karin Slaughter is about how an act of terror in a local mall changes the life of Andrea Oliver. Andy is 31 years old, and lives at home with her mother, having moved back from New York a few years back after her mother’s health problems.Andy’s life is boring and monotonous. She’s aimless and has no real ambition in life except to live from one day to the other, and that too in the most mundane way possible. She’s ashamed of the time she spent in New York, and is unwilling to tell anyone about her dreadful existence there.While Andy is celebrating her birthday with her mom, a gunman enters the cafe and proceeds to open fire. When Andy’s mother disarms the gunman, and manages to kill him, she is all over the news, especially as someone has managed to make a video of the whole incident. It takes Andy a few hours to realize that her mother might not be what she seems, and that Andy needs to act timely for once to save her mother and herself.Karin Slaughter spins a great story with enough twists and mysteries to keep the reader engaged. Unfortunately, her heroine is unbearable. When a woman of 31 acts like a 16-year-old, I find myself wanting to shake her really hard. At first, I thought she must be like this because of some trauma in her past, but that turned out to be a false hope. And when the same woman of 31 suddenly finds her spine and starts facing killers and being on the run on her own, I thought that I must be reading about someone else!Since the narrative goes back and forth in time, it is even more frustrating to read about another woman unable to make her own decisions and behaving in a similar manner. I couldn’t help but think that for someone who has gone through so much in life, she would at least raise a daughter who is strong and faces life head on.I’m not against having weak women characters in a story, or showing how a woman can overcome odds under adverse circumstances, I just want it to be believable. Slaughter’s Charlie and Samantha Quinn from The Good Daughter were a couple of badass women, who were believable with all their issues and baggage. Here, I was just left wishing for a couple of more engaging female protagonists.I also have a problem with the male characters in the book. Andy’s stepfather, who we come to know is the most important man in Andy’s life, vanishes from her life after Andy runs away. All the other male characters are also there to fill some gaps and then disappear into thin air. Overall, I couldn’t get myself to get behind any of the characters in this book, which is a shame because I really like Karin Slaughter as an author and want to read her other books too.

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Review: Nine Perfect Strangers

Rating: 3.5 Stars

Liane Moriarty is always a gamble for me. While I absolutely love Big Little Lies, I’m not a fan of some of her other work. It took me a long time to get around to reading Nine Perfect Strangers, but once I started, I managed to finish it in one day. What makes Moriarty a winner in my eyes is how easy it is to read her books.

Nine people book a 10-day retreat at a very expensive health resort known as Tranquillum House. All of them have different reasons for attending the retreat. None of them are quite ready for what coming here entails.They don’t have access to the outside world at all, their electronic gadgets all being taken away from them. The program surprises them, and most of them are resistant to the rules they have to follow.

The mastermind behind the retreat is a formidable woman, Masha, the resort’s director, who is determined to see her retreat program succeed at any cost. She dreams of changing the lives of these nine people like she has changed her own. Helping her achieve her dream are Yao and Delilah, both willing to do what is necessary to attain their own goals.

However, everything is not as it seems, for Masha has not disclosed the exact nature of the methods she intends to use for everyone to become a new person. As the group becomes used to the strict rules of the retreat, they are not ready to face the truth about what’s going on at the resort.

Told from alternating perspectives of all twelve people involved, the story is gripping and fast paced. Morairty uses simple language and short chapters which keep you from getting bored. All the characters are interesting, and have different outlooks on life which keeps the story from becoming monotonous.

What keeps it from being an excellent book in my eyes, is the plot that offers nothing new; we have all read books and watched movies with similar plots and stories. There is no big revelation, or a twist of epic proportions, and the characters are all squeaky clean with hardly any shades of grey. Even Masha’s character made me roll my eyes during the climax! Such a grand build up, and then it all just whimpers away.

Overall, an average read, with an extra half star for easy reading.

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Sunday Blues: Dream House

Growing up, my dream house always had the largest library imaginable. I didn’t know the number of rooms it will have, how big it will, or even if it will have a swimming pool or not. The most important thing was to have floor to ceiling shelves full of books, oh, and a ladder with wheels so that I could access all those books up near the ceiling!

As I grew older, I realized that it might not be possible to have such a library in the house and I might have to settle for a study full of shelves. I resigned myself to my fate and began looking forward to this dream study. I have to admit that in 40 years of my life there have only been two friends whose houses I have envied, both of them because they had a room full of books. I have shamelessly borrowed books from both the friends, and would have continued to do so had we not all gotten married and moved away from each other.

Over the years I have come to accept the fact that maybe I don’t really want a library. It requires too much work, and while I like my books organized and classified, I’d rather not do it myself. So it’s obvious that I need a messy study full of books in my life. Sadly, I still don’t have one. When we moved to our current place three years ago, I had definite plans on turning one of the rooms into a cozy little reading room full of books and easy chairs. Alas, my kids decided that they’d rather have separate rooms than let their mom move all their books to some other room.

And there you have it. My kids are the biggest hindrance to my dream library. They want their books to be close to them at all times. The other night I rescued 13, yes 13, books from the upper bunk of the bed where my second-born sleeps! His excuse: that he needed to have all these books with him because he never knew what he might want to read! facepalm It made me mad because he only goes up there when I turn off the lights, so what he’s reading in the dark, I don’t know.

When my husband told me a few days ago that we might have to move to another place, all I wanted to know was if there’s an extra room for my books. He just gave me that look and never answered my question. It doesn’t matter. Even if this new place has no library or study, I will not give up on my dream to have one some day. Maybe after one of the kids grows up and moves away? I don’t know, but I dream.

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Review: The Rumour

Rating: 3 Stars

The Rumour by Lesley Kara is a domestic thriller that looks into the how rumours spread, and how they can lead to unexpected outcomes.

The story follows Joanna, an almost-single mother, who has moved to Flinstead-on-Sea, a small, sleepy town, from London in order to be close to her own mom. Jonanna’s son is having difficulties settling into the new school, and Joanna is clueless about how to help him. Then one day she hears a strange rumour that she cannot get out of her mind. She doesn’t do it intentionally, but a careless remark from her starts a chain of rumours that cannot be broken. Now everyone is talking about how a child killer might be living in their town under a different identity.

Ten-year-old Sally McGowan stabbed and killed four-year-old Robbie Harris almost 50 years ago. When she got out of the correctional facility, she was given a new identity and the press was banned from ever reporting about her. The Harris family, however, have never gotten over the tragic death of Robbie and feel that they were given the short end of the stick. No photos exist of Sally from the time she came out from rehabilitation, and no one seems to know where she is.

As rumours fly, Joanna becomes suspicious of everyone, especially when she starts to fear for the safety of her son. There might be some truth to the rumours, and someone is aware that Joanna is to blame for them. The child killer is suddenly closer and more dangerous than she realized.

The book is just about average as far as thrillers go. The story has some merit but it seems to meander here and there. I started to lose interest in the middle, and it was hard to come back to the story. Joanna comes across as neurotic and high strung without reason. The common habit of going off alone to shady places, like all Hollywood heroines, is also present in Joanna. Who goes off alone into all these places if they know that they are already being threatened?

There are too many suspicious characters in an attempt to make everything more entertaining, but it becomes a struggle to make sense out of all their stories. There are some too-good-to-be-true coincidences, like Liz not knowing who Michael was, and Joanna seeing Kay’s mail, which just seem a bit irritating.

Overall, an average book that is good for reading on the beach and not putting too much thought into it.

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