Rosh's Reviews

AUTHOR: Trevor Noah GENRE: Memoir PUBLICATION DATE: November 15, 2016 RATING: 3.25 stars. Sometimes, when you pick up a well-reviewed book, you feel so much of an impatience to read it that you tend to miss out on an important element of the book - its title. 🤦🏻♀️ I took up Trevor Noah's "Born a Crime" with a fluttering of excitement in my heart. After all, I'm a big fan of his work on The Daily Show ( more so, his 'Between the Scenes' segment ). I knew this book would be truthful yet humorously entertaining. But now that I'm done with it, I feel like there's something missing.  The book has a lot less of his life than I was expecting to read. I wanted to know his initial struggles to becoming a successful mixed-race performer. I wanted to know his journey to America and life as host of an immensely popular daily programme. While pondering this dissatisfaction, I was staring at the cover and suddenly saw the tagline of the book: "Stories from a ...

AUTHOR: Madeline Miller GENRE: Greek Mythology Retelling. PUBLICATION DATE: September 20, 2011 RATING: 4.5 stars. If I tell you that I read a book named "The Song of Achilles", you might think it's a story containing Greek Mythology and/or Kings & Gods and/or Fighting for Honour and/or a great mythological storyline. Well, you're right; the book does have all these. But above all, The Song of Achilles is the story of true love. As the title suggests, the story is built around the famous Greek warrior, Achilles. However, the perspective that reveals Achilles to us is that of Patroclus, the narrator. ( I shan't speak much more on this because I don't wish to reveal any spoiler here. ) Patroclus' narrative style partly reminded me of Shams of Tabriz from "The Forty Rules of Love" . His love is real but not blind. His narrative stays loyal and yet doesn't hide Achilles' flaws. Madeline Miller uses the story of Achilles and the infamous Tr...

AUTHOR: Neil Gaiman ILLUSTRATOR: Chris Riddell GENRE: Middle-Grade Fantasy PUBLICATION DATE: July 2, 2002 RATING: 4.75 stars. When you are as silly as me to end up reading a Neil Gaiman book at night, there can be only two possible outcomes: 1. You are either too scared or too curious to close the book without completing it. 2. Your adrenalin has jumped over the roof with excitement and you MUST complete the whole story in one go. Either way, the outcome is the same. You can't sleep without finishing the book. Sometimes though, both the above outcomes can occur simultaneously. So here I am at 2am, having just completed this brilliant book and not an ounce of sleep in my eyes. Thank God it was a comparatively thin book, else I might have had to pull off an all-nighter. 😁 I am not much of a horror reader ( reason being the combination of an unnaturally wild imagination and an extremely cowardly heart! 😂😂) But when my 11 year old read and loved Coraline, it was almost like a challe...