Book Reviews
AN UNTIMELY LOVE by Tendai Huchu
www.tendaihuchu.com Genre: thriller Received for an honest review from the author. Print Length:274 pages Publisher: Whisky Creek Press Language: English AN UNTIMELY LOVE by Tendai Huchu Khalid is a young colored muslim, with a British identity. He is a bright chemistry university student. The pressures of being in the minority group, force him into the Jihad extremist group. Without the knowledge of his family, he secretly undergoes training and undertakes a suicide mission. Whilst on a train, on his way to fulfill his mission of martyrdom, he falls in love, loses his virginity, and consequently, has a change of heart, causing him to abort his mission. This is when his troubles begin. He realizes that what he thought he was fighting for, was not at the heart of those who were sending him. They were ruthless, selfish and had no concern for even his own life. With a new light in how he sees things and barely an hour to a planned attack of taking down 15 British airplanes and approximately 5000 innocent people, he sacrifices his life, to make things right, redeem his name and stop the perpetrator. MY THOUGHTS: AN UNTIMELY LOVE by Tendai Huchu. An Untimely Love is an exciting, fast paced thriller, were everything is better understood towards the end. It keeps the reader in suspense and yet excited enough to want to know what happens next. In his writing, Tendai manages to express and expose, the misconception that suicide bombers have about what they do; thinking they are fighting for a good cause and in hope of immediate transition to heaven. When Khalid fails to go ahead with the plan, he turns around, hoping to be understood and to find comfort in his leader, Tony. He is shocked to find that the very person he thought he could look up to, became his very sought out enemy. This book is a page turner and I think, many will find it exciting. Received for an honest review from the author. Details can be found at the author’s website,and My Book Addiction and More. RATING: 4 HEAT RATING: Mild detailed scenes of intimacy,mild violence or profanity REVIEWED BY: Jennipher .M. Zulu |
By Patrick Flanery
9:47AM BST 14 Oct 2014 Neel Mukherjee’s masterful second novel begins in 1966 with a harrowing account of impoverished wage labourer Nitai Das, unable to feed his starving wife and children, killing them in a horrific burst of violence before committing suicide. This intimate atrocity, born of deprivation and acute despair, is juxtaposed with the comparatively petty concerns of the bourgeois Ghosh family, making a profound point about struggles for equality in the world’s largest democracy during the long aftermath of empire. Three generations of the Ghoshes live under one roof in a four-storey house in south Calcutta, where family hierarchy mirrors the disparities of wider Indian society. Headed by ageing parents Prafullanath and Charubala, who are facing the decline of their paper- manufacturing interests, the Ghosh siblings, sisters-in-law, and youngest generation of cousins struggle with a variety of material desires: for a greater share of the family assets, beautiful clothes and imported pencil boxes, Western music and cosmetics. These obsessions, and the internecine struggles they engender, glimmer in contrast with the lives of a population so hopelessly poor they are moved to violence. Mukherjee’s deeply felt empathy for characters whose lot is often dictated by caste and entrenched social custom means that scenes of domestic drama and intrigue unfold in unpredictable ways. Chhaya, the cross-eyed and unmarried only daughter of the family, is consumed with envy towards her younger “low-caste” sister-in-law Purnima. Tormented by jealousy, she throws nail polish over Purnima’s new clothes, seeing to it that her niece Buli is blamed, while also plotting to reveal the girl’s clandestine romance with the boy next door. |
By Elena Seymenliyska
11:20AM BST 14 Oct 2014 The Cookes aren’t your average dysfunctional American family. Rosemary’s father is a pedantic college professor, her mother’s had a nervous breakdown, her brother is wanted by the FBI, and her sister is a chimp. Not a bit of a chimp as in ‘cheeky monkey’ or just someone who likes aping around. Literally, a chimpanzee: an African-born infant female they named Fern and brought up alongside baby Rosemary as part of a primate experiment. But something happened that meant Fern had to be sent away, and the mystery of what happened exactly is the hook that pulls the reader into this novel long before we realise that Fern is a chimp. That revelation comes about a third of the way in, by which time the novel has already established both the sisterly bond between the two Cooke girls and the eerie feeling that something’s a bit off between (or maybe about) them. Narrated in tones of ironic detachment by Rosemary, now a university student in California, the story of her extraordinary family life tumbles out in fits and starts, zipping back and forth in time. Once a little motormouth who could win gold at the talking Olympics, Rosemary has since had to learn to edit herself, choosing only one in three things she wants to say, and starting in the middle. But, even with her verbosity curtailed, she still has one over on her sister, who might have learnt to sign for food and cuddles but will never be able to speak. This sibling rivalry is Fern’s undoing, and with Fern gone the whole family unravels, too. Rosemary goes from a happy five-year-old swinging through trees with her sister, watched by a whole research team that hangs on her every word, to the weird kid in kindergarten who has to be reminded not to put her fingers into anyone’s mouth, or jump on the tables when excited. So while her father’s research measured the effect on Fern of being part of a human family, Rosemary’s life becomes a study of another kind – of the effect of growing up a little nonhuman. It’s a reminder of the animal that resides within each of us, however much we might try to forget or dispute it. That Rosemary herself initially turns away from Fern is all the more poignant, and makes her belated spurts of remembering deeply moving. |
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