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I love children’s or young adult (YA) books for how they make you feel. They are hopeful. They are inspiring. They make you feel heard. They help you calm your chaotic mind by making you focus on a story. And, best of all, you can finish it in a day or less and feel really, really accomplished.

So, often, I browse through the children’s section at bookstores to discover new books and authors. I also stalk friends and relatives who have children, on Instagram and Facebook, to find out what books their little ones are reading. ‘Gangsta Granny’ by David Walliams, ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ by Madeleine L’Engle and ‘The Poet X’ by Elizabeth Acevedo are some children/YA books I read recently. I loved all three. But the one I want to reread and recommend is The Poet X.

The book is about a 15-year-old girl named Xiomara and how disconnected she feels from her family. Her mother is a devout Catholic and wants Xiomara to follow suit. But Xiomara is a tough young girl with a mind of her own. She isn’t going to do anything unless she wants to. She also has a tendency to get into fights. With a lot of emotions bottled up, she tries to work her way through her issues by writing poems—that she keeps hidden in a notebook under her bed. Ultimately, a slam poetry club forces her into sharing her poems and thus revealing her secrets.

Acevedo has written The Poet X in the form of a collection of poems and each poem is a little self-contained story in itself. I’ve marked the bits I’ve loved and rereading them has been a joy. The poems, in their entirety, give you an insight into the mind of a young girl who is trying to find her voice and is unable to conform, even when the stakes are high.

Xiomara is a fascinating character and it often feels like she has somehow managed to get inside your head and is saying the things you have always wanted to say. The other characters—her twin brother who Xiomara refers to as ‘Twin’, her best friend, Caridad, and her English teacher, Ms Galiono—are also fun people to get to know. These characters show you a different side of life, a different way of being. You wish you had someone like them in your life too, to balance out your quirks a bit.

Overall, The Poet X has a lovely message to convey about the importance of staying true to yourself and pursuing your passion against all odds. It’s also about love, change and adapting to that change. Acevedo, through Xiomara, shows you there’s beauty in holding on to your dreams even when there are hundreds of things pulling you in different directions.  

Fiction

The Poet X

Elizabeth Acevedo

Published: 2018

Publisher: Electric Monkey

Language: English

Pages: 361, Paperback

For me this week has been full of regrets. First, I sold the currently circuit-breaking scrip in the share market for much less than what I could have gotten. Then I realized I had forgotten to the buy the subscription of Amazon Prime Video for the release of the highly anticipated “Drishyam 2: The Resumption”. By the time I got around the complicated hassle of subscribing, most of my social media mutuals had already posted rave reviews about the Malayalam-language thriller, and some inconsiderate ones had given out spoilers as well. Watching the movie won’t be the same now. With so many interesting releases lined up in the near future on Prime Video, I should probably switch between it and Netflix for my reviews too.

So, coming back to my week, in an almost distraught mood, I decided to invest my time on a recently released series on Netflix; mini-series to be fair and a thriller, so worth the risk. To my satisfaction, “Behind Her Eyes” turned out exactly what I’d expected it to be—a gripping suspense thriller that would keep me hooked throughout. The Erik Richter Strand-directed psychological thriller, which also has its fair share of the supernatural, is based on Sarah Pinborough’s 2017 novel of the same name.

Louise (Simona Brown), a single mother in London who works part time as a secretary at a psychiatric clinic, one night accidentally spills her drink on a man at a bar. That fateful encounter with David (Tom Bateman)—a psychiatrist who has just moved to London and is to become her boss at work—becomes a turning point in her otherwise normal life. Then she has another accidental encounter with David’s wife Adele (Eve Hewson) on the streets. They immediately hit it off as friends. The trio then gets entangled in a complicated relationship with each other. Louise starts an affair with David while she is also best friends with Adele. In all this, the dark sides of the mysterious couple start showing up and Louise is thrown into a storm of suspense, mystery and misery.

Each of the six episodes of Behind Her Eyes, ranging between 47-53 minutes, are so intriguingly suspenseful that the series-length seems inadequate. The filmmakers execute this British web series using single-camera setup and mostly indoor shooting. Not very fancy in terms of production, location and set-design, the film’s highlights are its story and the adapted screenplay, besides the acting of course. Packed in are so much drama, suspense and mind-boggling revelations, and without the need of theatrical antics and grandiosity. There’s some VFX, which is of course necessary for storytelling, and nothing more on the technological side. 

On the acting front, the lead trio of Brown, Bateman and Houston complement each other as they share screen-time. The dynamics between their characters demand the actors emote love and passion, which all lead actors do perfectly. Even in parts where the negative sides of their characters need to be projected, the actors manage to have the audience empathizing with their situations. Hewson’s Adele is the most mysterious character in the series. As a traumatized former patient of a mental institution, the layers on Adele’s characters are abundant. Her mood flips every other scene and her eyes terrify their intended target. Hewson does an excellent job of portraying the various personalities of Adele in the film.

Who should watch it?

Behind Her Eyes is an excellent specimen of how a series can be short and be perfectly confined in a season. This series does not leave behind unclosed storylines, forcing the audience to bear with the suspense till the next season. It completes what it starts—unless somebody writes a spin off if it—and this is why Behind Her Eyes is recommended to all those who want to cross over to a series from cinema. Think of this as one lengthy film and you will definitely enjoy it.

Rating: 4 stars

Genre: Triller, drama, mystery

Actors: Tom Bateman, Eve Hewson, Simona Brown

Director: Erik Richter Strand

Run time: 4hrs 30mins (approx.)

I read Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winner “The White Tiger” almost a decade ago. Though I don’t much recollect exactly what happens in the story, I remember the feeling it left me with: I was enchanted. Balaram Halwai, the narrator of Adiga’s debut novel, was the kind of anti-hero I always fell for.

I recently watched the film adaptation on Netflix and was reminded of what a wonderful storyteller Adiga is. I hadn’t read any of his other works like “Last Man in Tower” and “Between the Assassinations” which is why I decided to read his most recent book, “Amnesty”. Priyanka Chopra, actor and producer of the movie, The White Tiger, recommended it during Marie Claire’s Shelf Portrait where celebrities talk about books they love.

This much I will say: Adiga is a fine writer. He knows his craft and his stories, I feel, will always incite interesting conversations. Amnesty made me think about my immigrant friends and relatives and how tough things must have been for them when they first moved to various cities abroad. You have to give credit to Adiga for making you reflect on things that you necessarily wouldn’t think about and label other peoples’ problems.

Amnesty is the story of a Sri Lanka immigrant Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, known as Danny, who has overstayed his student visa in Sydney, Australia. As an illegal, he works as a cleaner at rich people’s homes and lives in a grocery storeroom. In four years, he has learnt to hide, to blend in when necessary, and tried to live a ‘normal’ life. Then, Danny finds out that one of his clients, Radha Thomas, has been killed. He is sure the murderer is another client of his who was having an affair with the victim. And thus begins Danny’s moral dilemma: Should he go to the police with the evidence he has and risk being deported? Or should he let it go and carry on with his life?

Amnesty is a story of how cultures and societies, across the world, make immigrants feel like they don’t belong and seeking validation thus becomes a large part of their lives. That ‘important message’ aspect of Amnesty is quite commendable. Adiga manages to convey immigrants’ pain, worries, and issues with crystal clarity. But that’s one part of fiction writing. It’s how well you manage the other feat—narrating the story in a way that reconfigures a reader’s brain wirings—that determines whether a book is good.

The problem with Amnesty isn’t the lack of a plot but that much of it happens inside the protagonist’s head. It’s his thoughts and feelings. It’s his side of the story. It’s only how he interprets the world around him and what’s happening that we get to see. Though the story takes place in the span of a day, you feel like you have been with Danny for years, which, in this case, isn’t really a good thing because Danny is a mundane character.

You are always confused and your thought processes are severely restricted because someone else’s thoughts are being fed to you. You feel like you are being spun around in circles and the effect really is dizzying.

I still wouldn’t say Amnesty is a bad book. I can see why it could appeal to some people, especially to those who have experienced life as an immigrant. But it wasn’t for me and neither is it for those for whom a good narrative structure is as important as the story.

Fiction

Amnesty

Aravind Adiga

Published: 2020

Publisher: Picador India

Language: English

Pages: 256, Hardcover

Celeste Ng’s debut novel ‘Everything I Never Told You’ took her six years to write. She worked on four complete drafts. No wonder it’s as good as it is. Every sentence feels deliberate—conveying so much while saying so little, and the writing is gorgeous. It’s a book you will talk and be nostalgic about long after you have read it. It’s that book you will be shoving under people’s noses saying, “You’re missing out.”

Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, Everything I Never Told You is a story about a Chinese American family living in Ohio in the 1970s, a time when being an immigrant in America came with a whole lot more issues than it does today.

Lydia Lee, a model daughter and ace student, goes missing. Her body is found at the bottom of a lake. The last person to have seen her alive is the local ‘bad boy’, Jack Wolff. Lydia’s elder brother, Nathan, is convinced Jack had something to do with her death. The rest of the family struggles to understand how this could have happened to their sweet and responsible Lydia—the last person you’d expect to get into trouble.

During the police investigation, the family is shocked to find that Lydia wasn’t who she appeared to be. Questions like ‘How was she doing at school?’, ‘Who were her friends?’, ‘Was she depressed?’, ‘Did she ever talk about wanting to hurt herself?’ lead to revelations that complicate the case. The people Lydia claimed to be friends with, she actually hadn’t spoken to for months. She never talked about troubles in school but, in fact, she was almost failing some courses. The family thought she kept journals. Her mother, Marilyn, gave her a new one every year. But she never wrote in any of them. 

It all begs the questions, ‘Who was Lydia?’ and ‘What was she hiding?’. Clearly, the girl her family knew never existed. So, what does that have to do with what happened to her?

As the family grapples with each shocking find, you see how death affects different people, how each person’s way of handling it is unique, and how it tears a family apart and then brings it together. It’s a crime drama where the drama isn’t related to the actual crime but its repercussions on the victim’s family. The book, I feel, brings together the best parts of a thriller and a family drama. These two elements together work brilliantly to keep the story taut and believable at the same time.

Everything I Never Told You feels like a labor of love. Reading it leads to a lot of introspection and a renewed sense of how we must value our loved ones for who they are and not who we want them to be. Ng (pronounced ‘-ing’) has given us a beautiful story of love, loss, and a sense of belonging that will resonate across generations.

Fiction

Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng                                                                 

Published: 2014

Publisher: Abacus

Language: English

Pages: 297, Paperback