All by Anushree Nande

Guest Review: A Monster Call by Patrick Ness

Guest Review: A Monster Call by Patrick Ness

Anushree Nande
Books

There are books you pick up with no idea of what to expect...and sometimes those end up being the best reads, the ones you didn’t even know you needed. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, based on an idea by late YA author Siobhan Dowd, has the added poignancy of Dowd’s own lack of time, her untimely death at the age of 47 after writing only 4 novels (all highly acclaimed). Winner of the Cilip Carnegie Medal, I finished it in a few hours---stunned and blindsided by the sheer power, emotion and depth of this deceptively simple story. I’m trying to remember the last time I cried so much while reading a book and coming up with a big recent blank.

Guest Review: The Inkworld Series by Cornelia Funke

Guest Review: The Inkworld Series by Cornelia Funke

Anushree Nande
Books

There are books that are relevant only for a certain part of your lives, and then there are those that stand the test of time, change and experience. I decided to re-read the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke this summer, a series my sister and I had enjoyed as kids.

(As a side-note, take a moment to enjoy these gorgeous covers. There are illustrations at the start and end of each chapter as well as quotes from other writers/books at the start of each chapter.)

What can be better than a series about books, stories and fantasy worlds? 

For an avid reader, it is sort of perfect when someone finds words to replicate their exact feelings about the joys of reading and books. How many times have we spent late nights caught up in a book that refuses to let us go until we reach the end? How many days have we spent happily in the company of worlds, characters and stories about people and places we have never met, never been to and possibly never will? (Especially in the cases of fantasy literature) And how many times have we wished that those worlds could be real so we too could be a part of them?

Guest Review: Journey to the River-Sea by Eva Ibbotson

Guest Review: Journey to the River-Sea by Eva Ibbotson

Anushree Nande
Books
This kind of fun will never fail to delight.

— Philip Pullman

Eva Ibbotson was an Austrian-born British writer. My first introduction to her was Journey to the River-Sea, and her later books, though still pretty good, could never match up to the magic and charm of the first, a book I still re-read today and enjoy as much.

Orphans form a large part of Ibbotson’s stories, which are usually set in the turn of the century England or Vienna. Journey to the River-Sea however is set in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazonian forest in Brazil. It is a different time and a different world. Electricity and the telegraph have already been discovered, but there are still many discoveries to be made and expeditions to be conducted in far-flung, exotic places, where the locals are still referred to as savages.

Guest Post: The Evocative and Layered The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Guest Post: The Evocative and Layered The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Anushree Nande
Books

The Shadow of the Wind is the first in a series of linked stories by Barcelona based Carlos Ruiz Zafon. (The Angel’s Game is a prequel which released later, A Prisoner of Heaven follows the story after The Shadow of the Wind and an as yet unreleased book will end the series).

1945 Barcelona is still coming to grips with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and Daniel Sempere, our main narrator and hero, is the son of a book-dealer. The narrative starts when a young Daniel is taken by his father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books where he is allowed to pick only one book to take out with him. His father explains that once Daniel makes his choice, he must be the book’s caretaker, guardian and protector. 

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

The mysterious The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax is the one that speaks out to Daniel, and later the very book that offers him solace from the loss of his mother. Curious about Carax’s other writing, Daniel stumbles upon a startling discovery – a shadowy figure who calls himself Lain Coubert (the name of the devil in The Shadow of the Wind book) has been systematically destroying every copy Carax has ever written; making Daniel’s copy potentially the only surviving. Over the span of a decade, Daniel unwittingly falls headfirst into his very own gothic mystery as he unravels the life of Julian Carax and gets much more than he ever bargained for. 

Guest Post: Small Things Become Big in Markus Zusak's I Am the Messenger

Guest Post: Small Things Become Big in Markus Zusak's I Am the Messenger

Anushree Nande
Books

 

Note: This is a guest post from CEFS reader Anushree Nande, who blogs at Lost in Translation, and wrote this stellar tribute to Friday Night Lights aka The Greatest Television Show of All Time for Sabotage Times.

Interested in writing a guest post for Clear Eyes, Full Shelves? Drop Sarah a line!

My love for Markus Zusak is a very well documented fact (you can read my reviews for his other books here and here), so you can imagine my delight at receiving a reply to my tweet about his I Am The Messenger (simply The Messenger for the Australian editions).

This is a book I’ve been meaning to read for a few years now but couldn’t get around to before. In the mean time, I had managed to read Zusak’s The Book Thief, Fighting Ruben Wolfe and Getting The Girl and fall in love with his prose. Hence it was with a lot of (perhaps unfair) expectations that I started this book, and it says a lot about the quality that I didn’t feel let down. There were a few disappointing bits but we’ll get to that later. 

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