Rosh's Reviews

Author: Angela McAllister Illustrator: Hannah Bess Ross Genre: Story Collection, Children's Fiction Rating: 5 stars. What a fabulous and eclectic collection this is!!! I loved it from the first page to the last! This is a collection of 50 folktales and fables from around the world. And when this book says “around the world”, it does mean around the world, and it does so in a very fair manner. Unlike many other collections which contain most stories from the USA or European countries, some tales from Russia and just a couple of stories from elsewhere in the world, this book focusses on all parts of the globe equally. It groups the stories by regions such as Africa, Middle East, Australia and Oceania, North America, and so on. Within each region, the stories come from a variety of countries. Hardly any country is repeated. Thus what you get is a rich variety of culture and folklore from diverse narrative viewpoints. The stories too are distinct and most of them are not the typical fa

Author: Jennifer Jenkins Genre: Historical Fiction Rating: 3.5 stars. In a Nutshell: If you want to know what happened in Eyam during the plague and how the citizens rallied together in those hard times, this is a great option. However, if you expect a well-structured and well-written book, you might end up disappointed. (‘might’ is the key word here.) Keeping a safe distance from others, staying at home as far as possible, dealing with deaths of family members while still surviving for the sake of those alive, understanding the importance of hygiene, the hope that the new year would bring a fresh start, the disappointment at some people profiteering from others’ struggles, simply living in hope day by day, growing closer to God, going farther from God,… all are aspects that are familiar to us since the last eighteen odd months. But we have been lucky in two ways: 1. Science is advanced enough to tell us the behaviour of viruses, and 2. Technology is advanced enough to help us keep in

AUTHOR: Rafaa Dalvi GENRE: Flash Fiction Anthology RATING: 3.75 stars. Until a couple of years ago, short stories simply meant short stories to me. It's only through my Facebook group and the interactions I've had there with authors that I've learnt about various sub-categories even within short stories. One of these is flash fiction, a very brief short story with sufficient plot and character development. While there is no predefined word limit for it, a hallmark of this genre is a clear plot hierarchy (start-middle-end) while maintaining brevity, and very often, a surprise ending. "Chasing Nirvana" is a flash fiction anthology that does a great deal of justice to the definition of the genre. It's a collection of 52 short-short stories, and most of these comply with the above requirements. The stories come from a wide variety of topics and genres: dark fiction, romance, sci-fi, thriller, drama,... The protagonists are good and bad and morally grey. Some stori