Skip to main content

Waves in the sky


Book Review

Author:  Rakhi Jayashankar
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
Pages: 215

Waves in the sky narrates the story of six girls who studied together in the same school and were popularly known as the Canaries.  CANARY is an acronym for Charu, Ananya, Neha, Avantika, Raihana and Yami, the six girls whose story unfolds in the novel.  The girls grow up and go to different colleges and also learn about some betrayals that had occurred within the group when they were at school.  Not all friendships are genuine.  People have various motives for being part of a group and some of the motives may lead one to betray the group or some members of the group for one’s own personal interests. 

Life is full of incidents that are born of betrayals by friends as well as relatives.  The novel explores some such betrayals or even plain murders.  Some of the murders can shock the male readers.  Are women capable of such cruelty?  Can a mother kill her own offspring?

The back cover blurb classifies the book as “Fiction: Contemporary Women.”  Written by a woman, the novel explores the psyche of some female characters though not in great depth.  The novel can also be classified as mystery or thriller.  Thrillers don’t explore the psyche.  They tell a gripping tale keeping the suspense alive throughout. 

The problem, however, is that Waves in the sky oscillates between the traditional literary narrative and popular thriller.  So it may fail to satisfy both kind of readers.  It fails to present well-rounded characters.  On the other hand, the mystery is not masterfully controlled.  Yet the novelist succeeds in telling a story that can keep the reader engaged with unflagging interest till the end.  Rakhi Jayashankar is a good story-teller.

A little more careful editing would have been desirable.  There are quite a few unpleasant phrases or sentences.  “Death rights” instead of “death rites” and “umpteen number of times” instead of “umpteen times” are examples. 

In spite of the grammatical and semantic drawbacks, the novel is eminently readable and highly fascinating because the author has indeed a good story to tell.  It presents the real life in a very realistic narrative.  It is light and pleasant reading.

Buy the book from:
Amazon
Flipkart

Read reviews at Goodreads.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Datta GhoshApril 20, 2016 at 7:27 PM

    That was an honest review. Thanks for sharing it

    ReplyDelete
  2. K V V S MURTHYApril 20, 2016 at 10:00 PM

    Balanced review..!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rakhi JayashankarApril 22, 2016 at 7:27 PM

    Thank You so much for the review. Your review is detailed and honest to the core

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Country without a national language

India has no national language because the country has too many languages. Apart from the officially recognised 22 languages are the hundreds of regional languages and dialects. It would be preposterous to imagine one particular language as the national language in such a situation. That is why the visionary leaders of Independent India decided upon a three-language policy for most purposes: Hindi, English, and the local language. The other day two pranksters from the Hindi belt landed in Bengaluru airport wearing T-shirts declaring Hindi as the national language. They posted a picture on X and it evoked angry responses from a lot of Indians who don’t speak Hindi.  The worthiness of Hindi to be India’s national language was debated umpteen times and there is nothing new to add to all that verbiage. Yet it seems a reminder is in good place now for the likes of the above puerile young men. Language is a power-tool . One of the first things done by colonisers and conquerors is to
14 comments
Read more

Diwali, Gifts, and Promises

Diwali gifts for me! This is the first time in my 52 years of existence that I received so many gifts in the name of Diwali.  In Kerala, where I was born and brought up, Diwali was not celebrated at all in those days, the days of my childhood.  Even now the festival is not celebrated in the villages of Kerala as I found out from my friends there.  It is celebrated in the cities (and some villages) where people from North Indian states live.  When I settled down in Delhi in 2001 Diwali was a shock to me.  I was sitting in the balcony of a relative of mine who resided in Sadiq Nagar.  I was amazed to see the fireworks that lit up the city sky and polluted the entire atmosphere in the city.  There was a medical store nearby from which I could buy Otrivin nasal drops to open up those little holes in my nose (which have been examined by many physicians and given up as, perhaps, a hopeless case) which were blocked because of the Diwali smoke.  The festivals of North India
50 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more