Rosh's Reviews

AUTHOR: L.M. Montgomery SERIES: Anne of Green Gables #3 GENRE: Historical Fiction, Classic. PUBLICATION DATE: November 1, 1915 RATING: 2.5 stars. Book 3, Anne of the Island, details Anne's years at Redmond college. Gilbert proposes, Anne refuses, Anne find a potential new beau named Roy, Roy proposes, Anne refuses, Gilbert falls sick, Anne realises her mistake and true love triumphs. ( Not putting a Spoiler Alert here because you already knew that the two of them would be together, didn't you? Right from the first book? ) Book 3 was as descriptive and as filled with endless new characters as Book 2, with only some of those characters actually taking the story ahead. So my feelings for it were exactly the same as for the second book: decent read but too much description for my liking.

AUTHORS: Various GENRE: Horror Anthology PUBLICATION DATE: March 11, 2020 RATING: 4 stars. Background first. I'm not a horror freak. I have watched exactly three horror movies in my life. The first was Urmila Matondkar's "Bhoot" in 2003. I still remember the scene depicting the twisted neck of the security guard. But I wasn't much scared during this movie. The second movie was one you might not even remember, it was that big a flop: Sushmita Sen's "Vaastu Shastra" released in 2004. My then-fiance ( currently husband, in spite of this torture he wreaked on me a month before our wedding! ) suggested that we go see it in the theatre. I couldn't refuse. ( Izzat ka sawaal, you know? ) Biggest mistake of my life! There was one scene where a ghost was shown attacking the victim from the ceiling. Phir kya? For at least two months, I couldn't enter any room without checking the ceiling first! 🤦🏻‍♀️ The third was "Stree". No horrific tales ...

AUTHOR: Hans Rosling GENRE: Nonfiction PUBLICATION DATE: April 3, 2018 RATING: 4.5 stars. It was truly coincidental that I took up a book written by a global health expert just before a global health crisis. When I started with this book, the Coronavirus scare had begun, but was restricted to China and parts of Europe. But as I progressed with the book, the virus and the panic seemed to grow at an exponential rate. In these stressful times, if there were a few things that helped me retain my sanity, one of them was this book. Factfulness, mainly authored by Dr. Hans Rosling, teaches you a "factful" way of looking at data and making sense of it. Dr. Rosling fleshes out the seemingly boring topic with a very steady, interesting, interactive and sometimes humorous approach that causes you to be spellbound. Every single page is enlightening. Each chapter is named after a particular instinct that he says humans have which causes them to look at data in a lopsided way. For instance...

AUTHOR: L.M. Montgomery SERIES: Anne of Green Gables, #2 GENRE: Young Adult Classic. PUBLICATION DATE: January 14, 1909 RATING: 2.5 stars. Finally, after a lot of huffing and puffing, I am done with Anne of Avonlea, the second book of the Anne of Green Gables series. Sadly, the book didn't entirely live up to my expectations, but I think I am more to blame for that than the book itself. Long ago, I had watched the old Anne of Avonlea movie of 1987. So somewhere, I had expected the book to be exactly the same story. But now I realise that the movie might have been based on some subsequent Anne book(s) because most of the things that occur in the movie aren't even in this book's timeline. Well, time will tell! Anne of Avonlea details Anne's life from ages sixteen to seventeen. She is literally at the threshold of womanhood, but has not yet abandoned her girlhood. She looks at life with the same carefree attitude, she is still on the lookout for "kindred spirits"...

AUTHOR: L.M. Montgomery SERIES: Anne of Green Gables, #1 GENRE: Young Adult, Classic. PUBLICATION DATE: January 1, 1908 RATING: 4.25 stars. Some of you might remember the "Maria" song from The Sound of Music. It is a lovely song describing a girl who is full of contradictions. Just see these particular lines from the lyrics: "She is gentle! She is wild! She's a riddle! She's a child! She's a headache! She's an angel! She's a girl!" This is perfect not just for the orphan Maria but also for the lovely little orphan we meet in Anne of Green Gables. Anne starts off as a typically atypical child. She's an orphan and has faced hardships like not many of her age have. And yet, she hasn't let go of her childhood innocence, exuberance and curiosity. Fate contrives to put her under the care of Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert (who are siblings, not spouses) in Green Gables. Marilla, who initially does not want a girl orphan for very practical reasons,...

AUTHOR: Alix E. Harrow GENRE: Low Fantasy RATING: 4.25 stars. There are books that zoom like an express train, rushing ahead at top speed, leaving you breathless & eager to find out what lies beyond. There are other books that move at a snail's pace, meandering all over, with no end in mind, leaving just a trail of slime behind. And then there are books like this one! Books that make you want to rush ahead and yet proceed slowly! Let me attempt an analogy... Imagine you have been given a jigsaw puzzle. You have to put the pieces together but you haven't been given any reference image. So how exactly the pieces have to be fitted is entirely up to you. In addition, each piece is mesmerising. You get so absorbed in admiring each tiny clue that you forget the motive, the puzzle. But once you see signs of the picture emerging, you find it very difficult to stop and relish the individual pieces. You just want to reach the end asap so that you can appreciate the completed picture ...

AUTHOR: Caitlin Doughty ILLUSTRATOR: Dianné Ruz GENRE: Nonfiction PUBLICATION DATE: September 10, 2019 RATING: 4.5 stars. If anything about Death intrigues you, or if you have any queries about cremations or decomposition or funny doubts about what happens if an astronaut dies in space or if you die when you are eating or how corpses smell, this is the book for you! A beautifully enlightening book replete with great examples and tongue-in-cheek humour, it deserves an audience. Caitlin Doughty, the author, is a mortician in real life and she puts her experience and knowledge to good use. As she says in the introduction, "We can’t make death fun, but we can make learning about death fun. Death is science and history, art and literature. It bridges every culture and unites the whole of humanity." I never thought I'd enjoy any book about such a morbid topic so much. Just in case the title makes you squeamish, keep in mind the tagline: "big questions from tiny mortals....