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. Anupama JoshyMay 3, 2022 at 10:31 AM

    Got to read this

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pandian RamaiahMay 3, 2022 at 8:24 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. Deepa DuraisamyMay 11, 2022 at 6:07 PM

    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
  4. Deepa DuraisamyMay 11, 2022 at 6:08 PM

    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
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
14 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more