Personal Blog of Dagny Sol, Editor and Author Coach
More Unfairy Tales by T.F. Carthick My rating: 5 of 5 stars I loved the first volume of the retold fairy tales–Carthick’s Unfairy Tales. I loved it so much that reading this second volume was a given. I’m delighted to find that Carthick has written another winner, every bit as engaging as the first book. […]
A few weeks ago, my dear friend Zephyr told me she was reading a book that she was falling in love with. She strongly recommended that I read it. Zephyr needs no introduction. Her blog, The Cybernag, is iconic. She is the Granny of the blogging world, a lady of robust home-grown wisdom and perfectly […]
If You Only Knew Me by Divyata Rajaram is a multi-layered story. It is a story about five expat women living in Dubai. Their lives are glamorous, living as they do at the higher echelons of Dubai’s Indian society. The women are friends, even good friends. Despite their apparent friendship though, there are threads of […]
Small is Big- by Rafaa Dalvi Brevity is the soul of wit, said Shakespeare; it is the sister of talent, said Chekhov. Writing flash fiction is challenging as well as deeply satisfying. I have loved all varieties of micro-fiction- as a reader as well as a writer. Micro-tales compel you to stay focused on your […]
Pretty Vile Girl: The protagonist you will hate to love! When you have racy plot and myriad, twisted sub-plots married to a series of brutal murders, committed with ice-cold nerve made all the more chilling by a kind of detached, almost meditative casualness, you get a Pretty Vile Girl! The theme of this novel is revenge- […]
Fairy tales are written for impressionable youngsters; Unfairy Tales are written for discerning adults. The values and perceptions of the modern world are not the same as those of the times when the Perrault, Anderson and the Brothers Grimm penned down their stories. Today, their stories seem biased, bigoted and even regressive. Humans have learned […]
The theme of the novel is unusual, specially in the Indian context. Men wanting to marry women older than themselves aren’t thick upon the ground in India, as yet. For an author to have picked such a theme for his debut novel, speaks of his own comfort with the idea. The love interest between the […]
BRAHMAHATYA: by Rajiv Mittal Complicated yet integrated characters, a skilfully created sequence of inevitable events and a thick suspense plentifully fed by a revengeful, murderous intent, Brahmahatya has it all. To make the novel additionally delectable, there is the generous inclusion of local flavor. This, I said to myself, is an Indian story written in English. […]
Water Boarding is not just a romantic story. While the story revolves around love (yes, there is a love triangle), this story is a lot more than just another romance. The story demonstrates how circumstances and events can hold you immovably captive in their grip, reducing you to a helplessness so acute that you feel as […]
To be honest, this is not a book review. This is the description of a soul-satisfying feast. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the first paragraph of the book was about maasor tenga, a signature dish from verdant Asom. It is not just a paragraph heralding a gripping story. It has layer upon layer of […]