Skip to main content

Under the Mistletoe - Review

Book Review


Title: Under the Mistletoe & Other Stories

Author: Manali Desai

Manali Desai’s stories have a unique quality. They carry the salt tangs and sweet flavours of life effortlessly. The sweet smiles of love mingle with the sobs of loss and grief just like in life. There is longing and there is fulfilment too. Santa Claus is always there somewhere in the background with his graciousness and twinkling stars. Yes, these are Christmas stories. All twelve of them in this anthology. There are six poems too, again with the Christmas carols echoing in the background.

Writing ultra-realistic stories which charm the reader delightfully requires a touch of genius. That’s all the more true when the stories revolve round a particular theme or season like Christmas. The author of this anthology possesses that genius. She can bring a few very ordinary staff of an institution together in a Christmas celebration and weave a fantastic romantic tale with an inimitable twist at the end. A few passengers of a delayed flight can meet at an airport and not only overcome their frustrations of not being able to celebrate the New Year with family but also forge new friendly relationships that will last long.

Relationships matter much to Manali Desai. There is plenty of them in her stories . There is a lot of tenderness and Christmas is a fitting background to them. The title story, ‘Under the Mistletoe,’ is a striking example of such tenderness. The one which follows it, ‘Elfish Grinch,’ too carries such tenderness straight to the reader’s heart.

Memories too come and go with their versions of tenderness. ‘A Foggy Memory’ and ‘Alma Matters’ come to mind instantly. Both of these take the protagonists back to some fond childhood memories. But something more than remembering happens in both.

The six poems at the end of the collection too carry the Christmas flavour. I particularly loved the boy who asks Santa for a gift with a difference: “Make me old enough / Or maybe / Convince my parents, / That I’m old enough, / To go out alone with my friends, / To ask a girl out on a date…” And the PS to this poem made me burst out laughing: “Not to be confused with Ithan, who is my friend.” The supplicant’s name is Ethan.

The title ‘Under the Mistletoe’ has a romantic touch. There is romance in most of the stories. But more than that, there is the real human life in them. Life as it is lived by ordinary people each day. Manali Desai has succeeded in adding poetry to that life.

PS. The book is available at Amazon.

Comments

  1. Seems like this would be bunch of enjoyable writing. I should read it as well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sounds interesting, will give it a read. The way I see it, the word romance in the true sense is more about finding the beauty in everyday little things, experiences and relationships! Bollywood and Hollywood kind of messed it up!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Interesting review, will give it a read! The way I see it, the true essence of romance is the feeling of beauty and warmth in the everyday little experiences and relationships! Hollywood and Bollywood messed it up!

    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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...