Kevein Books and Reviews

Afsaane by Ameya Bondre is a riveting collection of 11 short stories. Each story has an aura of freshness while dealing with the life’s most common themes like love, lust, relationship, betrayal, social taboos, family melancholy, and so on. The great thing about this collection is that nothing sounds set in a premeditated environment. The stories are with proper climax and hold a sense of intensity and unpredictability till the last line. Thus, for sure that most of the time readers must have felt as they are going through a novella.In the beginning, stories are more focused about relationship status, unspoken distance, mutual understanding gone sour, family caretaking, divorce situation, and so on. As the collection chugs ahead, different shades of life is being portrayed finely and precisely. But most of the stories about love are silent in their stance, for instance that one where the guy presents a handwritten diary of musical notes to her lover on the occasion of her wedding. The…

The Ganges and Other Poems by Mahathi is a brilliant poetry cum prose book on the River Ganges, with many other devotional poems inside. It’s inclined towards Bhakti, and seems emanating from Hinduism. The book is religious in its narrative and stirs a sense of spiritual mystery, awe, and fascination in readers’ hearts. The book starts with an extensive, yet brilliant, forward. As it progresses, we see the book is divided into three sections. Starting with the first section, it’s about Prayer – it has some 4 prose/eulogies dedicated to the lord Rama. The following lines briefly sums up the love of the poet towards his faith in the lord Rama: “SiaRam, SiaRam – their names as Holy Pslams, and forms as frozen Om, I say Pranaaams.” The second section (The Ganges) is about the great river Ganga. It consists 7 short prose cum poetry work. This section is purely read like literature juice. The poet introduces us to the mythological and religious history of the river Ganga. Through the poems a…

Pandemic Aftermath (How Coronavirus Changes Global Society) by Trond Undheim is a well-thought-out and well-researched book on the current crises of Covid 19, also known as Coronavirus. Mixed with facts, stats, and future scenarios – at times the book sounds part dystopian, and many a time it looks like a futuristic book. Be it any time or era, one of the peculiar characteristics of any pandemic is that it creates an environment of fear, grief, hopelessness, and tension for a longer time. Therefore, societies are bound to change. This book (Pandemic Aftermath) that runs over 450 pages is basically about Coronavirus. The book counts all possibilities that this pandemic is bound to leave on us. However, Trond is not anxious about future predictions, in fact he has done a tremendous research to recount the previous pandemics, as in how they changed the world’s all layers.The book kick starts with a solid introduction about pandemics of yesteryears like the Black Death of 13th century, an…

This is the first book in the Gamed trilogy; it’s a sort of adult romance. The story features Kristina, Smith, and Craig as major character. There are others as well, but in limited roles. Kristina is a young lady, successful at her career. She is married to Smith. Soon after the marriage to Kristina, Smith leaves for the UK for better job opportunities. Kristina waits for him in her hometown but to no avail. She longs for him and misses the pre-marriage romance. But after marriage Smith changes drastically. He becomes so career and money inclined that he takes his family and its allied values for granted. The novel focuses on post marriage life and what relationship facts one should check before getting married. Kristina’s biggest worry is the test of time, along with loneliness. She finds it hard to determine what is running inside Smith’s heart. Has his love changed for her or did he get along with someone else?The author used flashback technique to rope in the situations perfectly.…

A few months back I had read Silhouette and Other Poems by Tasnima Yasmin. It was a great and contemplative collection. It was much suited for regular readers than kids. Well, but there were a few poems that indicated her orientation towards kids. So, now I finally got a book that is totally for kids of around 4 to 10. I personally love children's literature, as it does not burden one with rules and expectations. You like what you get. Coming to her new book that is entirely for kids, I loved the book and read it over 5 times in last one month. Even I showed the beautiful pictures put with each poem to kids at my home, they were so engrossed and got excited that I had to take a colour printout of the PDF book for their reading, basically fun.It’s a short 75 page book, with having 24 very short poems. I must say that the illustrations sketched by Sadia Sultana are simply superb and great. Children stared at them whenever they get time to go through the book. Talking about content - …

Faith and the Beloved by Kochery C Shibu is a riveting crime thriller novel set in the contemporary time. The novel has detailed character development and a rich dose of history when connecting all the characters in future. The story is not about one victim or person or a detective playing hide and seek with his suspects, rather it’s more about circumstances in life, and how some people take on that extra leap to fight for their beloved ones while trying to keep their faith on religion/god intact. I loved how the author started the novel with fast-pacing yet descriptive family backdrop of Prem and Naithy. In Prem’s case, it’s his grandfather who got the curse on the family by stealing someone’s gold. And in Naithy’s case, her lineage goes back to far beyond 18th century and the time of Britishers in India, one of her ancestors got into tea business owing to a favour by a British man. Anyway, the author covered a lot from that time to when we see Alice Cherokil and Prem Rollands. They a…