Skip to main content

Glitter and Gloss

This book Glitter and Gloss has been written by Vibha Batra who sent me a Facebook request that I’d accepted despite not knowing her personally because I saw that she was an author and I was interested in her work. I used to do this a lot in Bangalore. I frequented this place called Urban Solace especially to meet authors and get to know them and their work.

That activity had to be curtailed because I’m now in a remote village and find it hard to stir out. So I was quite delighted when she reached out to me. Even more delighted when I found out that we had two or three mutual friends (according to FB, one of whom is an author from Bangalore) Of course, she saved the best for last – when she asked me to review her book, ‘Glitter and Gloss’ and sent me a copy of the same.

I was delighted since I’m a huge fan of chick lit as I’ve stated on another blog that I own.

So I started reviewing it and I was thrilled that it sparkled with wit and humour.  It’s desi chick lit at its finest.

I say desi coz she generously uses words like aira gaira nathu khaira(which was new to me) in her narrative.

Right from her acknowledgements, it was all very creatively written.  She referred to her family as her ‘Foundation’, her editor as the concealer and so on, this being a book about the beauty industry.

She is funny too. I mean take a look at this:

” My last roommate used to walk and talk in her sleep. Why do you think I started latching my room door? And the girl before her, god, she was worse. She was a pathological liar. Say, she was in a ‘Pink Top’ and I asked her what she was wearing, she’d reply, ‘Blue Pants.’ I mean, she was that bad.”

The plot is a complete entertainer with a serial romancer(a girl this time) from a dysfunctional family, looking for a stable guy, finding Mr. Right, and ending up wooing his family. A kind of reverse Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge if you will, but not quite! Throw in a best friend, a male roomie, a bitchy co-worker and you’ve got a complete cast of characters for a nice rom-com.


This could be made into a nice movie! Karan Johar, are you listening?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review of 'Magical Women'

I bought Magical Women by Hachette India on Kindle a few days back. It had been on my TBR for a long time. However, I hadn’t read up on what kind of a collection of stories the book would contain. People who like weird stories, horror, dystopia and sci-fi might enjoy this collection, which has been edited by Sukanya Venkatraghavan. It was published in 2019.   The editor’s note states, “Each story in this collection is unique in its representation of what it means to be magical.”   It may not be everyone’s cup of tea. The book is well written, but some of the themes are a bit disturbing. The first story “ Gul” by Shreya Ila Anasuya has themes of lesbianism. The second story “ Gandaberunda” by S.V. Sujatha is violent and macabre. When I read the third story, ‘Rulebook for Creating a Universe’ by Tashan Mehta, I felt that although I was reading English, I was seeing Greek and Latin. It went totally above my head.   I really enjoyed the fourth story ‘The Demon Hunter’s Dilemm...

My Book Review of 'Bitch Goddess for Dummies'

Recently, I attended a zoom session on chick lit by the Chennai Lockdown Literary Festival (CLLF). In the session, one of the speakers was Maya Sharma Sriram. I was so impressed with the way she conducted the session and answered the questions that I decided to pick up her chick lit novel, ‘Bitch Goddess for Dummies’ brought out by Rupa Publications in 2012. And I was not disappointed. I’m not sure if I was biased toward the book by the personality I had seen on zoom or not, but I quite enjoy chick lit and have read several chick lit novels in my thirties.   So the novel is about a 27-year-old woman Mira Iyer who decides to transform her personality from good girl to ‘bitch goddess’ to deal with the people in her life. Her mom who is constantly trying to fix her up with some eligible guy so that she can get married and Sanya, the real office bitch who is always cosying up to their bosses and vying for a promotion, are just two of the people in her life causing her angst. So it’s go...

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang - A Book Review

  This book has been on my TBR since the time it was featured in The New Yorker in 2019.  I bought the Kindle edition recently and read it over 2-3 days. The author Esmé Weijun Wang is an American writer who has written the novel, The Border of Paradise (2016) and The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). She has received the Whiting Award and was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta magazine.   Wang has been diagnosed with a slew of health issues: schizoaffective disorder— bipolar type, idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, fibromyalgia, complex PTSD, dysautonomia/POTS, chronic Lyme disease, and the extremely rare cotard’s delusion and capgras syndrome.   Wang calls her book “the collected schizophrenias” to include all the diseases that go into this basket, including schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, and schizotypal personality disorder. Since she was into psychological research herself, her awareness about these matters ...