Tag Archives: Speculative

Feb27

Ten Incarnations of Rebellion by Vaishnavi Patel

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Thank you to NetGalley and Ballentine for an ARC of this wonderful book for review.

The author took inspiration from the Ten Avatars of Vishnu and wrote this story of an alternate reality as if India didn’t gain its independence back in 1947. The beginning of the story was set in the 1960s and we follow the main character and her allies for a number of years.

This non-independence for India in the 1940s made for interesting reading in a couple of ways. One, the characters who were front and center were normal young women who stepped up to fight for freedom from their oppressors. The author didn’t spare any detail on just how cruel an occupying force can be on the citizens of the country they are subjugating. Some of the scenes were brutal and heart-wrenching.

Most of the young men of the fictionalized town in the story were sent off to fight in a war that they weren’t responsible for making. They were basically the bodies needed to engage the enemy and had no choice as they were drafted.

The women of the town stepped up even more once the men were gone and waged their own war against the government occupation.

One of the things I enjoyed a lot about the story was learning more about the Ten Avatars of Vishnu. The author was very skillful in how she wove them into each of the chapters of the book. The action in the chapters were each tied to one of the incarnations and each chapter ended with a tale of a certain avatar. There were ten chapters representing the ten avatars. The tie in stories of Vishnu added so much flavor to the story. A very clever way to tell the tale. Each of them taught lessons that we can all learn from such as compassion, courage, and justice. I especially enjoyed that the main character’s name was tied so closely to one of the avatars. Again, very clever.

I admit I didn’t know much about all the avatars of Vishnu when I started reading and this book really taught me about them in a way that was easy to read and comprehend. I found myself doing research to refine what I was learning in the book. I love learning about the culture of India and find myself reading a number of fiction tales set in that region as they are interesting and enlightening. This one gets five stars from me for the adventure, alternate history with women at the forefront and for the lessons learned about the Hindu religion.

BLURB:

Kalki Divekar grows up a daughter of Kingston—a city the British built on the ashes of Bombay. The older generation, including her father, have been lost to the brutal hunt for rebels. Young men are drafted to fight wars they will never return from. And the people of her city are more interested in fighting each other than facing their true oppressors.

When tragedy strikes close to home, Kalki and her group of friends begin to play a dangerous game, obtaining jobs working for the British while secretly planning to destroy the empire from the inside out. They found Kingston’s new independence movement, knowing one wrong move means certain death. Facing threats from all quarters, Kalki must decide whether it’s more important to be a hero or to survive.

Told as ten moments from Kalki’s life that mirror the Dashavatara, the ten avatars of Vishnu, Ten Incarnations of Rebellion is a sweeping, deeply felt speculative novel of empowerment, friendship, self-determination, and the true meaning of freedom.

Dec14

Ghost: Justice Chronicles Book 1 by Michael Jack Webb, a Review.

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This book had a good story, buried in way too much minutiae and exposition. The characters had interesting backgrounds and the premise of the story was great. Sadly, the action was interrupted constantly by overlong descriptions and encyclopedia “dialogue” being inserted way too often. The periods of natural dialogue were good, but there was not enough of that to satisfy this reviewer.

The heroine’s parents disappeared, and rather than being upset and focused on finding them (she’s an FBI profiler), she’s more concerned with what the local cop is wearing when he shows up and that he looks like Chris Pratt. There’s a long section on Chris Pratt and how she binged watched his movies in grad school. This was the first of many such interruptions in the flow of the story.

At one point, the main characters are driving along investigating the case of the serial killer that takes her attention away from finding her parents. She mentions a winery and stopping to get a bottle of her favorite wine. She then goes into a long one-sided discussion of the history of the winery. This totally took the reviewer out of the story and was not the only time such exposition did so.

Each time the characters went to another location, one of them would go into great detail about the history of the area (to the point it was laughable as it appeared whole sections of the encyclopedia were cut and pasted into the text.)

Another time, they ate at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park and we got the whole history of the hotel as well as the town. These numerous interruptions of the actual plot of the story—that added nothing to moving the tale along—began to grate on this reviewer’s nerves and caused the focus of the tale to meander off on tangents.

I kept reading as I was interested in how the story would turn out, but sadly, the author seemed to get in his own way. What could’ve been a tight, taut, thriller turned into a slog of too much information. Research is important to add richness to the story line, but telling the reader everything that was learned in the research for the novel takes away from the pacing and excitement of the story unfolding in a thrilling manner. Little tidbits sprinkled in to add authenticity to the settings/circumstances is good, but wholesale chunks of research take the reader out of the story.

I’d give this one three stars.  If it was tighter and there was not so much dialogue that sounded more like recitation from the encyclopedia, I would’ve rated it much higher. I most likely won’t read the next in the series even though I like the storyline. The information-dump style is not for me. I much prefer a tightly written, fast paced story. For those who like an intense history lesson while reading a novel, this one may be right up your alley.