Thirteen Reasons Why...

On Twitter, I stumbled upon this link promoting the Netflix Original Series 'Thirteen Reasons Why' based on the Young Adult book by Jay Asher. Now I'm not a subscriber of Netflix, but the Kindle edition of the book costs Rs.249.85, which sounds well worth it, if you ask me, based on the storyline, which sounds promising. I'm yet to read it.

The tagline for the story is "You can't stop the future, you can't rewind the past, the only way to learn the secret is to press play'.

It got a 4/5 rating on Goodreads and was originally published in 2007 by RazorBill, a YA imprint of Penguin Books. In July 2011, the paperback edition was # 1 on the NYT Bestseller list.

It's about Hannah who commits suicide because she is carrying a heavy burden caused by an inability to speak up. So she carries dark secrets in her heart and stumbles through life as everyone takes advantage of her, deceives her and betrays her trust time after time until she takes her own life. Clay Jensen who receives thirteen cassette tapes recorded by her, is a shy high-school student, who, after viewing the tapes, understands why Hannah took her own life and immediately reaches out to Skye, a suicidal young friend.

In a time when people do dark misdeeds and infringe on other people's privacy, this summary highlights the fact that there is only so much that a person can take before it gets too much.

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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...

Moved to a new blog

Dear reader, Please follow me on https://aishwariyalaxmi.com/ where I will be posting on writing, editing, reading and books. I hope to migrate all of this content to that site some day, but until then, do follow my new updates there. Thank you and stay safe.

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...

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