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Book Review – Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (translated by Charles Wilbour)

July 15, 2026 by Vishy

I’ve wanted to read Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Misérables‘ for a long time. Its size intimidated me. I once picked it up and read around 250 pages, but I got distracted after that and I couldn’t continue. I thought I’ll pick it up again and read it. I’ve been reading it for nearly one-and-a-half months. There were other distractions many times and sometimes I thought I’ll take a break from the book and read a smaller book for a while. But I’m glad I didn’t succumb to these temptations and kept on. Yesterday night I turned over the final page of the book and I was very happy. I felt that I’d accomplished something big. I feel proud of myself.

Most of us have heard of the main story told in ‘Les Misérables’. It is about Jean Valjean who steals a loaf of bread and ends up in jail for 19 years for that. This unfair aspect of the law troubles us. We’ve also probably heard of the story in which Jean Valjean stays overnight in a Bishop’s house and early in the morning steals all the silver plates and cutlery and leaves the house. But the police arrest him and bring him back. But when the police bring him back to the Bishop’s house, the Bishop tells the police that he gifted those silver plates and other things to Jean Valjean. The Bishop also asks Jean Valjean why he forgot to take the silver candlesticks with him and gives them also to him. This melts Jean Valjean’s heart and he undergoes a huge transformation and it changes his life in a big way. These are the two most popular anecdotes from ‘Les Misérables’. Then there is the story of Inspector Javert who keeps chasing Jean Valjean till the end of the story, trying to get him back into prison. These stories we’ve read about or heard. But ‘Les Misérables’ is an epic novel, and there are many more stories, anecdotes, subplots and characters. Sometimes in a significant part of the book, Jean Valjean is absent and Victor Hugo shines the light on some other character.

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This story puts poor people and oppressed people in the limelight. So it is very different from other French novels of that era. Most of the main characters are poor or from difficult backgrounds and how they manage their lives and how some of them manage to stay positive and find happiness inspite of their situation is very fascinating to read. There is a street kid called Gavroche who was one of my favourite characters in the book. He is cool and stylish and brave and fascinating and fearless and kind. He himself is a kid but at one point he takes two other kids, even younger than him, under his wing, and takes care of them. It melts our heart. The way he faces the soldiers fearlessly in the middle of an insurrection and sings in the end is just heartbreaking.

The Bishop who is kind to Jean Valjean gets significant space in the book. The first 100 pages of the book celebrate him. It is wonderful to know his backstory and his life and the way he lived. He is one of the most beautiful characters in the story, an angel on earth.

I hated Javert from the time I met him in the story. He is honest, follows the law to the T, doesn’t concede an inch. Unfortunately, such people are hard to like, because they are not kind, they are not humane. And Javert is exactly like that. Javert believes in the law, believes that it is perfect. Towards the end of the story, someone shows Javert an act of kindness and saves him. And then something happens to Javert. There are two beings in his heart who go to war against each other, one who believes in the law, and another who believes that there are things beyond the law. And Javert is torn between them. There is a beautiful opening line in William Gaddis’ ‘A Frolic of One’s Own’. It goes like this – “Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” Javert discovers exactly this, at that moment. And after hating Javert for the whole book, I felt bad for him. It was like hating Severus Snape for the whole story, and then finally discovering that he was not a bad guy after all.

I learnt a lot of French history through the book. Victor Hugo digresses in many places in the story and gives us the historical background of things. He spends quite sometime on the Battle of Waterloo and it was fascinating to read. He also spends sometime on how France kept flitting between a Republican form of government to a monarchy between the French Revolution in 1789 till even the 1840s. It made me want to read a proper book on the history of France.

The book is an epic, and so the pace is not even. Sometimes the story moves fast, sometimes it moves slowly, sometimes we learn a lot of history, sometimes the descriptions are overwhelming. But in a book of this size, it is to be expected. For me the descriptions were at times the hardest to read. Victor Hugo doesn’t do anything by halves. He doesn’t give one paragraph descriptions. When he wants to describe something, it runs into pages. If it was history, it was fascinating for me, if it was a description of physical places, it was hard for me. But I took it all in my stride. I just told myself that Victor Hugo was educating the reader and it was up to me to take what I can.

I loved ‘Les Misérables’. It was an unforgettable reading experience. It kept me immersed in its world of 19th century France for the last one-and-a-half months. And now that the time has come to part, I feel sad, it is hard to let go. I feel like crying.

There are many film adaptations of ‘Les Misérables’. It is a book which is hard to adapt to film because it is so big and it has a huge cast of characters and so many stories and events and subplots woven in. The only way to adapt it into a movie is to cut down a lot of these characters and stories and subplots, but this is not satisfying for the reader of the book. It will be a better idea to adapt it into a series running into multiple seasons and not making any sacrifices on the stories or the characters. But unfortunately that is the ideal Platonic world in which we don’t live. I know of atleast two Tamil film adaptations of the book, ‘Ezhai Padum Paadu’ and ‘Gnana Oli’, made in the old days when Tamil film directors were well-read and were well-versed in international literature. I want to watch them sometime and find out how Jean Valjean, Fantine, Cosette, Marius, Gavroche, Javert are featured in Tamil. There is also the Hollywood musical version which came around 10 years back which was acclaimed. I remember Anne Hathaway playing the role of Fantine and singing. I can’t imagine the original Fantine from the book singing. Her life was hard and heartbreaking.

Sometimes there is a book which defines a country, which is part of the country’s cultural psyche. The way ‘War and Peace’ is for Russia, ‘Three Kingdoms’ or ‘A Dream of Red Mansions’ is for China, ‘The Mahabharata’ is for India, ‘The Tale of Genji’ is for Japan, ‘Don Quixote’ is for Spain, ‘The Iliad’ or ‘The Odyssey’ is for Greece. I think ‘Les Misérables’ is that book for France. It has been more than 160 years since the book came out. It is celebrated by French readers and it comes out in any French literature required reading list. It also has an international following and it is celebrated across the world. I’m going to do the clichéd thing and say this. If you are going to read just one French book, let this be the one. It is wonderful.

Have you read ‘Les Misérables’? What do you think about it?

Posted in Book Review, French Literature | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

Book Review – The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

May 23, 2026 by Vishy

I’ve wanted to read ‘The Count of Monte Cristo‘ for a long time. I love revenge thrillers and this was the mother of all revenge thrillers. I tried reading it a couple of times and I could read a chapter or two, but the size of the book was intimidating and soon I gave up. A couple of weeks back, I read my friend’s review of the book, and I was inspired and I thought I’ll try reading the book again. I thought I’ll read a few chapters and see how it goes, and then decide what to do. I needn’t have worried, because once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. I dropped everything else and read the book for the past two weeks, and finished reading it late in the night yesterday.

‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ is the story of Edmond Dantés. Dantés is a mate in a ship and the ship’s owners decide to promote him as captain. Around this time he is also going to get married to his betrothed, Mercédès. But a couple of people who know him, don’t like him. They engage in a conspiracy and it results in Dantés getting arrested on the eve of his wedding. Soon things get more complicated. The government prosecutor realizes that Dantés is innocent and promises to release him. But he also discovers that Dantés carries something with him that will implicate the government prosecutor’s own family. So the prosecutor does the thing that any bureaucrat would do – protect his own family and implicate the innocent person. Dantés ends up in a dungeon in a prison in an island. How he comes back from there and take revenge against the people who wronged him forms the rest of the story.

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My favourite part of the book was the first part, which runs to around 360 pages. This is the part in which Dantés ends up in prison and what happens there and how he escapes from there. The rest of the book, which runs to around 1100 pages, is about how he takes revenge. It is complex and slowburn and fascinating and not at all what I thought. (I thought that Dantés will trap the bad guys and then reveal himself and then shoot them down, but this is not exactly what happens 😊🙈)

One of my favourite characters in the book was Abbe Faria. He comes in only a couple of chapters but he is an ocean of knowledge and intelligence and he changes Dantés’ life. I thought that Mercédès would have a bigger role in the book. But in the places she appears she is wonderful. The chapter towards the end in which she pleads with Dantés is one of my favourite parts of the book. There is also an Italian robber in the book called Luigi Vampa, whom I liked very much. When he and his gang were not robbing, he read Caeser’s Commentaries and Plutarch’s Life of Alexander 😊 He was such a cool robber 😊

One of the things about a revenge story is this. Let us say that someone has wronged you or betrayed you and your suffer for years because of that. Then you plan a long, meticulous revenge to destroy your enemies. What happens if you fall in love with someone and that person turns out to be your enemy’s sibling or son or daughter? If you destroy your enemy, you are going to destroy your beloved too. What will you do then? What happens if while taking revenge on your enemy, you hurt innocent people? You can brush it aside as collateral damage, but what if this innocent person is dear to you? Are you ready to hurt someone dear to you because you are hellbent on revenge? These are some of the complex questions which comes in a revenge story. Alexandre Dumas gives shape to most of these questions and lets us see what happens. It is complex and not straightforward and it is one of the things I loved about the book.

When ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ first came out, R.L.Stevenson, one of my favourite writers, called it ‘a piece of perfect storytelling‘. In an interview, Jeffrey Archer calls it his favourite book. Now I know why.

I’ve read only one book by Alexandre Dumas before, ‘The Three Musketeers’. I’ve read it many times and it used to be one of my favourite books. Now I’m happy to have read a second book by him. I can’t tell which one I like more. ‘The Three Musketeers’ is mostly fun, while ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ is a bit dark. I loved both.

I don’t read many chunksters. I read a chunkster only once in a blue moon. So every time I read a chunkster, it feels like an accomplishment. At 1462 pages, ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ is definitely one of the big chunksters. In terms of number of pages, it is No.2 on my all-time list. I’m very happy and glad that I finally got to read it.

Have you read ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’? Who is your favourite character from the book? Do you like revenge thrillers?

Posted in Book Review, French Literature, Thrillers | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments »

Book Review – Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones

April 30, 2026 by Vishy

I’d never heard of Diana Wynne Jones when I was a kid. I heard of her only when I started reviewing books. Then I read her book ‘Dogsbody‘ and I loved that. Many Diana Wynne Jones fans regard ‘Fire and Hemlock‘ as her finest work. So I thought I’ll read it now.

The story told in ‘Fire and Hemlock’ is complex. I wouldn’t have understood it if I’d read it as a child. I wouldn’t have understood it even as a teenager. I think it is written for children and kids, but it is better appreciated as a grown-up. But even then it is hard to understand. I don’t know how to review the book. But I’ll try.

Polly is playing with her friend Nina. They accidentally stray into their neighbour’s mansion. And Nina suddenly disappears. Polly enters the mansion and discovers that there is some of kind of gathering there with a lot of people. It seems to be a funeral. There Polly meets a man called Thomas Flynn. He knows that she is an outsider. They have a friendly chat for sometime and then he guides her back to her home. An interesting friendship blossoms between the two, though he is a grown-up and she is a kid. They exchange letters and gifts and meet occasionally. Polly imagines make-believe worlds and has adventures in them and she shares them with Tom. She discovers that Tom thinks similarly as her and they talk about these adventures together. What happens to the friendship between these two, as the real-world comes crashlanding on them is told in the rest of the story.

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What I’ve described above is one way of looking at the story. There are other ways of looking at the story. The story could also be described as a fantasy, as sometimes magical things happen in the real world. When Polly and Tom talk about fantastic things in their make-believe world, sometimes those things start happening in the real world. Sometimes the people they imagine in their make-believe world, step into the real world. And the mystery deepens. Another way of looking at the story is this. No one in Polly’s circle has seen Thomas Flynn. She talks about him to her mom and grandmom and friends, but no one has seen him. During this time, Polly’s parents are separated and are going through a divorce. In the middle of this, we start wondering whether Thomas Flynn is real, or whether she has created him in her imagination, and he is an imaginary friend, who helps her get through her situation at home. Sometimes Polly herself starts wondering that. So there are multiple perspectives to the story. The author Diana Wynne Jones has written a beautiful essay, ‘The Heroic Ideal – A Personal Odyssey‘, which is included in the book. In that essay, she describes how Homer’s Odyssey inspired her to write this book. I couldn’t see that connection, of course, till I read her essay.

The friendship between Polly and Thomas Flynn made me think about the friendship between Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell. It looked very similar and I wouldn’t be surprised if Diana Wynne Jones had derived her inspiration from that real-life story, but I didn’t see references to it anywhere.

The complexity of ‘Fire and Hemlock’ extended to the ending. I’m not sure whether the story had a happy ending or a sad ending or whether it was open-ended and left things to the reader’s imagination. One part of it sounded like a happy ending, but I’m not sure. If you read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I enjoyed reading ‘Fire and Hemlock’. It is not a book for everyone. Sometimes its complex nature can annoy readers. But I’m glad I read it. I have to say though that I loved ‘Dogsbody’ more. It is a more straightforward story and it makes you cry in the end.

You can find Kaggsy’s (from ‘Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings’) beautiful review of ‘Fire and Hemlock’ here.

Have you read ‘Fire and Hemlock’? Which is your favourite Diana Wynne Jones book?

Posted in Book Review, Children's Literature, Fantasy | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

Book Review – Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian

April 23, 2026 by Vishy

My exploration of children’s literature which I couldn’t read as a child continues. I’ve wanted to read Michelle Magorian’s classic novel, ‘Goodnight Mister Tom‘ for a long time. A few days back, I picked it up.

It is the start of the Second World War. Children living in London are evacuated to the countryside to live with families there, as it is expected that London might be bombed. Willie is sent to a small village to live with a man called Tom Oakley. Tom is a man who keeps to himself, avoids engaging with the community. He doesn’t have a family. But he decides to support the war effort and takes Willie in. The experiences these two have and the beautiful friendship that grows between them forms the rest of the story.

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‘Goodnight Mister Tom’ brings alive that time period, when the war started and children were separated from their families. Willie has a dark past but the war changes his life as he makes new friends and grows as a person and this is beautifully depicted in the story.

I loved both Willie and Tom. They were both such fascinating characters. Willie’s best friend Zach was also one of my favourite characters in the story. I also loved Tom’s dog Sammy. He was so cool. Later in the story another dog called Rumple makes an appearance and I loved him too.

One of the interesting stories in the book is about Carrie. She is talented and she wants to go to high school. Her father is supportive but her mother is not, atleast initially. Whether she realizes her dreams is beautifully told. Willie’s teachers in his new school in the village are very inspiring. They made me remember some of my favourite teachers.

One of the things I loved about the story is that the author tries reproducing the regional accents faithfully in the story. I think if I’d read this book as a kid, I’d have struggled to understand some of those sentences and conversations. I didn’t have any problem now. But it made me think about how hard it is to depict spoken English in different accents on the page. For example, this line – “You can’t do that, sir. That’s agin’ the lor.” The second sentence is, “That’s against the law.“

There are some occasional twists and turns and surprises in the story, and something sad happens towards the end (the author could have been kinder to the readers here, in my opinion). The story was beautiful and though the book is a bit long for a children’s book (429 pages), the pages just flew by.

‘Goodnight Mister Tom’ won the Guardian Children’s Book Prize during its time, and was adapted into a TV drama. This is Michelle Magorian’s first book and it is so hard to believe that, because it is so accomplished. I loved it.

Sharing some of my favourite parts from the book.

“‘Look!’ he said, gazing up through the trees. ‘Look! There’s a swallow.’

Willie screwed up his eyes and peered upwards. All he could see was a bird. A swallow to him was something you did when you ate food or you did to stop yourself from crying. He couldn’t see how that could be in the sky.”

“Unlike the jaunty tunes of the carols, these notes were long and lingering. They throbbed and shook the frame of the organ, sometimes dying to the gentlest and saddest of sounds, only to crescendo and fall again. Willie had never heard anything so beautiful. As Tom lifted his fingers from the organ the music seemed to sink and fade into the very walls of the church. Tom sat back and flexed his fingers several times until his knuckles cracked.”

“He could sit by the quay and sketch to his heart’s content and there was so much to see, new shapes to draw, new colours to store into his memory. There were some things, though, that he could never capture, things like smells and feelings and sensations of touch. They were ‘now’ things to enjoy only for a moment.”

“She was a shy woman and her shyness manifested itself in great bursts of incessant chatter.”

“How could anyone not want to live, thought Will, when there were so many things to live for? There were rainy nights and wind and the slap of the sea and the moon. There were books to read and pictures to paint and music.”

Have you read ‘Goodnight Mister Tom’? What do you think about it?

Posted in Book Review, Children's Literature | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

Book Review – The Kingdom by the Sea by Robert Westall

April 16, 2026 by Vishy

My exploration of children’s literature which I couldn’t read as a child continues. Yesterday, I decided to pick up ‘The Kingdom by the Sea‘ by Robert Westall.

The story is set in England during the Second World War. Harry lives with his parents and his younger sister. Every day the Germans send bombers and they explode bombs on his town. One day the air sirens ring loudly. Harry and his family pack their things. Harry reaches the air raid shelter first. But before his family joins him, the bombs start falling. As the book describes this –

“The whistling of the bombs was rising to a scream. Harry began to count. If you were still counting at ten, the bombs had missed you. The last thing he remembered saying was ‘seven’.”

When Harry regains consciousness, he discovers that his house has been reduced to rubble and his family has been buried in it. Rescuers come and help Harry out. He seems to have only minor scrapes. But his house is gone and his family is gone. He decides to take whatever he has and leave the town. When he is resting in the beach, a dog joins him. The dog doesn’t seem to have anyone. The name tag says that his name is Don. Harry and Don become friends. What happens to them and the adventures they have form the rest of the story.

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‘The Kingdom by the Sea’ is a gripping story. British children’s literature writers are famous for setting stories during the war and narrating the story from a child’s perspective, and Robert Westall does that brilliantly here. The writing is spare but beautiful and the pages just fly.

There are many people that Harry and Don meet during their travel adventures, some good and some bad. My favourites among these characters were Joseph, the man who lives near the beach and regards himself as a child of the sea, Artie, the gunner from the British army who befriends Harry and is kind to him, an old woman who lives in a big mansion whom Harry helps and she invites him to stay as a guest for a while, and a Vicar who leaves food and other things for strangers inside a train coach with a note. There were other fascinating characters too, but these four were my favourites.

There was a mention of Don Bradman and Wally Hammond in the story which made me smile. There was also a mention of Field Marshall Montgomery (‘Monty’) and I was happy to read that. I read Monty’s ‘The Path to Leadership‘ when I was in school and it was very inspiring and I loved it.

These lines from the book made me smile 😊

“They listened in silence to Bruce Belfrage reading the news. The news wasn’t very good, as usual.”

It is 2026, and nothing much has changed. The news still isn’t very good 😄🤦

The story has a huge surprise in the end which I didn’t see coming, and the ending is complex and unexpected and it was a bit sad too, atleast for me.

I loved ‘The Kingdom by the Sea’. Robert Westall wrote this book based on his childhood experiences and based on things that he’d seen and heard at that time. It shows in the story because it feels very authentic. Westall is a two-time Carnegie Medal winner (Carnegie Medal is the prize given every year to the best children’s book in the UK) and this book won the Guardian Prize. He seems to be one of the great British writers of children’s literature during his time. Looking forward to exploring more of his work.

Sharing some of my favourite parts from the book.

“He felt… he felt like a bird flying very high, far from the world and getting further away all the time. Like those gulls who soar on summer thermals and then find they cannot get down to earth again, but must wait till the sun sets, and the land cools, and the terrible strength of the upward thermal releases them to land exhausted. Only he could not imagine ever coming to earth again, ever. Back to where everything was just as it always had been, and you did things without thinking about them.”

“Harry remembered something his dad had said about dogs in air raids. They suffered terribly with their ears, because they could hear ten times better than people. The sounds were ten times as loud to them.”

“On the edge of sleep, Harry thought how right it felt, to be bedding down under a boat again. With the dog. It felt like the only way he had ever lived now. Other bits of him seemed to have dropped off during the day. He tried to think of Dad and Mam and Dulcie and the old days, but the pictures wouldn’t come. But he didn’t worry. They were buried somewhere, deep and safe in his mind. He’d be able to think about them again. Some day. For now he had the sound of the sea, and a full belly, and warm blankets. And Don. And for the first time, that was enough.”

Have you read ‘The Kingdom by the Sea’? What do you think about it? Which is your favourite Robert Westall book?

Posted in Book Review, Children's Literature | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

Book Review – The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson

April 15, 2026 by Vishy

After reading two Eva Ibbotson books, I decided to read a third one, ‘The Secret of Platform 13‘.

I’ll just reproduce the brief description of the story from the back cover of the book. I think I can’t improve on it.

“Under Platform 13 at Kings Cross Station there is a secret door that leads to a magical island. It appears only once every nine years. And when it opens, four mysterious figures step into the streets of London. A wizard, an ogre, a fey and a young hag have come to find the prince of their kingdom, stolen as a baby nine years before. But the prince has become a horrible rich boy called Raymond Trottle who doesn’t understand magic and is determined not to be rescued.”

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I loved all the four characters who step through the secret door, the wizard, the ogre, the fey, and the hag. My favourite was the hag, who is close in age to the missing prince. Her name is Odge. She is an awesome person, takes risks, shows a lot of bravery and courage, and makes a big sacrifice in the end. When I started the story, I didn’t know that Odge the hag would end up being my favourite character from the book.

I loved all the magical, supernatural creatures in the book. They were beautiful people, kind and wonderful. As Zed says in ‘The Star of Kazan’ – “Rocco’s just a person who happens to be a horse.” We can say the same thing about the magical beings and animals in this book. The harpies were the ones who were hard to like, but even they were good people.

I loved the way the people in the magical island lived in harmony with the magical beings and different kinds of animals. Here is a brief description of that.

“With the floating island, of course, came the people who were living on it: sensible people mostly who understood that everyone did not have to have exactly two arms and legs, but might be different in shape and different in the way they thought. So they lived peacefully with ogres who had one eye or dragons (of whom there were a lot about in those days). They didn’t leap into the sea every time they saw a mermaid comb her hair on a rock, they simply said, ‘Good morning.’ They understood that Ellerwomen had hollow backs and hated to be looked at on a Saturday and that if trolls wanted to wear their beards so long that they stepped on them every time they walked, then that was entirely their own affair.

They lived in peace with the animals too. There were a lot of interesting animals on the Island as well as ordinary sheep and cows and goats. Giant birds who had forgotten how to fly and laid eggs the size of kettle drums, and brollachans like blobs of jelly with dark red eyes, and sea horses with manes of silk which galloped and snorted in the waves.”

It was a beautiful island, almost like the Garden of Eden.

I also loved the monster called the nuckelavee, who lives in the bottom of the lake, and who is woken up by the wizard and requested to reveal himself. That scene was very beautiful.

There is a character in the story called Ben who is one of the main characters. I loved him too. The friendship between him and our favourite hag, Odge, is one of the most beautiful parts of the story.

The story is fast-paced and charming and funny and humorous and the pages just fly. There is an amazing surprise at the end which I didn’t see coming.

I loved ‘The Secret of Platform 13’. It is different from the other two Eva Ibbotson books that I’ve read as it focuses on magic and it is almost like fantasy.

One last thing about the book.

When the first Harry Potter book, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ first came out, some readers pointed out some similarities between that and ‘The Secret of Platform 13’. So I was curious to find those similarities. The secret platform in the train station is, of course, one similarity. The fact that there is a secret portal from our human world to a magical world which opens only at particular times, is another similarity. But this secret portal was first made popular by C.S.Lewis in his Narnia series where Lucy steps into a wardrobe and enters Narnia on the other side. This has been often borrowed and repeated in so many fantasy stories since. Everyone owes a debt to C.S.Lewis for this. One more similarity between the books is this one. There being two boys who live in a house, and one boy who is nasty but is treated well, while another is nice but is treated badly, this is another one. This is also there in the Narnia series in ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ which Eustace Clarence Stubb makes his appearance and he is that nasty guy who treats the Pevensies badly. But beyond these similarities, I feel that they are both very different stories.

I loved ‘The Secret of Platform 13’. Hoping to read more of Eva Ibbotson’s magical fantasies now.

Have you read ‘The Secret of Platform 13’? What do you think about it? Which is your favourite Eva Ibbotson book?

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Book Review – Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson

April 13, 2026 by Vishy

After reading ‘The Star of Kazan‘, I thought I’ll pick up another Eva Ibbotson book, ‘Journey to the River Sea‘.

Maia is an orphan. Both her parents have passed away. But they’ve left her a good inheritance and so her life is comfortable. She is in boarding school but when the holidays arrive, she doesn’t have anywhere to go to. One day her family lawyer arrives and tells her that he has tracked down one of her distant relatives and they’ve said that they can take care of her. The only catch is that they live in Brazil. The lawyer asks Maia whether she is interested. Maia is very excited and she dreams that she is going to have adventures on the Amazon and immediately says ‘Yes’. The lawyer says that a governess, Miss Minton will accompany her and will take care of her. What happens after that and what adventures Maia has form the rest of the story.

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The ‘River Sea’ in the title refers to the Amazon, because many small rivers flow into the Amazon. Most of the story is set in Brazil and that part of the story is beautiful. Eva Ibbotson tries to balance both the European point of view and the native Brazilian point of view and that aspect of the book is nice. Miss Minton is a fascinating character and there is more to her than meets the eye. I also loved Finn and Clovis and Professor Glastonberry and the Xanti people. I also loved Rob, the dog. There is a beautiful passage about Rob, which goes like this.

“Finn’s dog was called Rob, but no one used his name much. He was somehow all dogs rolled into one with his trust and intelligence and faithfulness; and though he could hunt his own food and steady the canoe by putting his weight in the right place, he understood that when humans were upset one had to sit there while they pulled one’s ears, or buried their faces in one’s back, or even cried. A dog who will allow himself to be cried over is worth his weight in gold.”

The book also inspired me to read more about Amazon exploration, especially the books written by Henry Walter Bates, Alexander von Humboldt, and Alfred Russell Wallace. I’ve heard of Humboldt and Wallace, but Bates is new-to-me. Those must have been exciting times, exploring the Amazon and discovering new things everyday, new plants and trees, new animals, butterflies, and other living things, and new people with a different way of life. It is unfortunate that the world is not exciting like this anymore with everyplace having been travelled to and put on the map and everything having been photographed and analyzed and catalogued and described. I think as an intellectual adventure, the 19th century was amazing. In comparison, the 20th century was boring, except for the rise in technology. The 21st century looks worse.

I loved ‘Journey to the River Sea’. Can’t wait to read more Eva Ibbotson books.

Sharing some of my favourite parts from the book.

“But his father was dead and he had left Maia, and suddenly being alone, which he had always enjoyed, turned into loneliness, which was a very different thing.”

“It was his time with the Xanti which had changed him. They thought that everyone’s life was like a river; you had to flow with the current and not struggle, which wasted breath and made you more likely to drown. And the river of life seemed to be carrying him back to Westwood.”

Have you read ‘Journey to the River Sea’? Which is your favourite Eva Ibbotson book?

Posted in Book Review, Children's Literature | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

Book Review – The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson

April 9, 2026 by Vishy

Many years back, I watched a movie called ‘Crimson Tide‘, which I liked very much. In the movie, the two main characters have a discussion about Lippizaner horses. So I did more research on Lippizaner horses. I read about books and movies that they were featured in. One of the books they were featured in was this one, ‘The Star of Kazan‘ by Eva Ibbotson. That is how I discovered this book. Later, I went and got this book, but I never got around to reading it. Yesterday, I decided to take it out and read it.

Ellie and Sigrid work in a house in Vienna. Three professors, two brothers and a sister, live in that house. Ellie and Sigrid cook and clean and keep the house running. The professors are eccentric but they are kind. Once in a while Ellie and Sigrid take a day off and they go on a trek to a mountain and spend sometime enjoying the view from the top. Once when they go on this trip, Ellie gets tired and she takes rest at a church on the way, while Sigrid goes to the top. When Sigrid doesn’t hear from Ellie for a while, she comes back down to the church. She sees that Ellie is still there but she has a new born baby in her hand. Someone had left their baby in the church. Ellie and Sigrid take the baby and go to a convent. But the convent is under quarantine. So they take the baby home and somehow convince the professors to let them keep the baby and bring it up. They call the baby Annika.

Annika grows up into an intelligent young girl. She loves helping Ellie and Sigrid in the kitchen and in other things related to the house. She also has friends with whom she plays. The professors treat her like their own daughter and share knowledge from their areas of expertise with her. Annika is happy. She just has one dream. She hopes that one day her actual mother will walk into the house, she’ll look beautiful and elegant, and claim her as her daughter. And suddenly one day it happens. But things are not as they appear. There are secrets and mysteries and they impact Annika and the people who love her. What happens after that forms the rest of the story.

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I loved ‘The Star of Kazan’. It is set in Vienna before the First World War, when Vienna was the cultural capital of the world. So the description of Vienna in the book is very beautiful and breathtaking. It takes us back to that glorious era, and we feel that we almost live there. Vienna, the city, is almost a character in the book.

I loved our heroine, Annika, and her adopted family and her friends. She makes more new friends later, and one of them becomes a central character in the story. The story has many surprises and the ending is beautiful. The book was around 400 pages long, but I read it in just two days. I didn’t even try, the pages just flew by, that is how breezy it was. This book was published in 2004 and it was very unusual for its era. Children’s books and YA books of that era were mostly set in the contemporary world, but this was sent in a bygone time, but the setting and the characters and the storytelling were authentic. Eva Ibbotson was a unique writer. I can’t believe that I waited so long to read this book. I’m glad I finally got to read it. Now I can’t wait to read more Eva Ibbotson books.

Sharing some of my favourite parts from the book here.

“Ellie had decided that Annika was old enough to make a proper apple strudel entirely by herself. Making an apple strudel on your own is a bit like climbing Everest without oxygen. Only one very special type of flour will do, the dough has to be teased out to be paper-thin and laid over a tablecloth, and the apple slices and melted butter and nuts and spices have to be poured on without making a single hole, before it is rolled into a dachshund shape and baked.”

“It wasn’t till you were told you couldn’t do something that you realized how much it had meant to you.”

“Annika had seen gypsy musicians in their colourful romantic costumes in the cafes in Vienna. They had beribboned guitars and celestas and cymbalines and exotic-looking instruments of which she did not know the names.

The men who came out of the caravans were not like that. Yawning, rubbing their eyes, they came out of their wagons carrying battered fiddles, ancient cellos, accordions with worn-looking keys.

And then they started to play.

At first Annika did not like the sound they made; it was so different from the lilting Viennese waltzes she was used to. This music attacked you; it was fierce and angry…at least it was at first; she listened to it with clenched hands. Then suddenly one of the fiddlers stepped forward and played a melody that soared and wreathed and fastened itself round the heart – a sad tune that sounded as if it was gathering up all the unhappiness in the world – and then the other musicians joined in again and it was as though the sadness had been set free. The music was no longer about life being sad and lonely. It was about life being difficult, but also exciting and surprising and sublime.”

“Caring for the horse did not depend, for Annika, on being allowed to ride. It was a thing in itself.”

“Rocco’s just a person who happens to be a horse,” said Zed.

“Whatever troubles the humans had, Rocco did not share them. Life in Vienna suited him and he was making more and more friends. An old mare between the shafts of one of the cabs in the Keller Strasse seemed to think he was her long-lost son; the man who sold newspapers in the square behind the opera saved sugar lumps for him. Traffic did not trouble Rocco; he trotted serenely past honking motors and swaying trams. Children began to point him out.”

“There is a name for what it was that troubled Pauline. It is called agoraphobia, which means fear of open spaces and strangers. People who suffer from it are perfectly all right indoors or if they go out with friends they know and trust. But when they’re alone in unfamiliar places they suffer from panic and dread. They tell themselves not to be silly, but it doesn’t help any more than it helps people who are terrified of snakes or spiders to tell themselves that they are being silly. A phobia is a silliness you can’t control and it is a very frightening thing to have.”

Have you read ‘The Star of Kazan’? What do you think about it? Which is your favourite Eva Ibbotson book?

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Book Review – The Woman and the Ape by Peter Høeg (Translated by Barbara Haveland)

April 5, 2026 by Vishy

After reading two Peter Høeg books, I decided to read a third one, ‘The Woman and the Ape‘.

An animal smuggler has an ape in his boat. It looks like a big chimpanzee. He is trying to smuggle it into London. But there is an accident and the ape escapes. It ends up in the hands of Adam Burden, a scientist. He discovers that this is a new species of ape which hasn’t been seen before, and it is more closer to a human being than an ape. It seems to have human-like intelligence. He tries to use this to further his own career. But his wife, Madelene, wants to save this ape, help it escape, and give it freedom. But there is no freedom. It is almost impossible for an animal to escape the clutches of this human designed system. What happens after that forms the rest of the story.

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‘The Woman and the Ape’ is an interesting story. It asks some profound questions, on what happens if we discover animals which are as intelligent as human beings, will we treat them with respect or will we treat them as specimens on which experiments should be conducted in a lab, or will we treat them as the enemy. And is it really possible for any of us to get real freedom, and is it just an illusion in our modern world.

“Do animals think?” asked Madelene.

‘The Woman and the Ape’ is very different from the other two Peter Høeg books that I’d read. The focus is more on the plot, the concentration of the prose is not high like in the other two books and because of that the book is easy to read. The ending was also very surprising and unexpected, I didn’t see that coming. There are also some parts of the story which will make some readers uncomfortable and maybe even shock them. So please be forewarned.

Sharing one of my favourite parts from the book.

“Do animals think?” asked Madelene.

They were halfway to South Hill Park before Johnny answered.

“Pit ponies,” he said. “I used to look after them, as a lad. In Morton. The mine shaft ran out for six miles under the Atlantic. You got out there by diesel train. But out by the coal face the tunnels were so narrow that only men and horses could get through. The last bit not even the ponies. There you had to crawl along on your stomach. With a lamp and a hydraulic hand drill. Six miles out and a half mile under the seabed. You couldn’t get your mind off the props. Holding up the roof. So spindly. But when you started thinking like that, that’s when you looked back. At the horse. They catch any sign of shifting long before a man would. Sense if the air supply is starting to give out. Or if there’s a leak. And they can give signals. Like people. But more subtle. If the horse was calm, everything was okay.”

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“Where would I go?”

Madelene gestured vaguely at the light, the trees, the affluence surrounding them.

Johnny gazed out the windshield. At the walls around the houses, at the closely guarded iron gates, at the fence encircling Parliament Hill.

“Would that have been any better?” he said.

For the third time in less than a week Madelene’s notions of freedom listed to one side; then they keeled over and started to break up.

“You got used to the heat. To working lying down. To the air. To the fact that there’s no room to move. The hard bit was being alone. Because there wasn’t a sound to be heard. It’s dead quiet. And suddenly you feel that you’ve been deserted. That you’re the last person alive on earth. A half mile down. That was when you shoved the lamp back and looked at the horse. Its muzzle was all black. Like your own face. Its eyes glittered. Like your own. It was the same as you. But perfectly calm. Not because it was stupid. But because it wasn’t thinking unnecessary thoughts. It wasn’t thinking about yesterday, or tomorrow. Nor closing time or the Third World War. It was thinking about here and now. And looking at it, you began to feel the way it did. And then you grew quite calm. And sometimes…almost happy. Like when I drove the animals. Most of the time your thoughts flit about all over the place. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Problems, problems. But transporting Bally’s animals you didn’t think about anything but the driving. No loneliness. And behind you in the dark, their eyes glittering. you could feel them. Fine, powerful, strange. To be protected. You couldn’t make the slightest mistake. Or there would be a cave-in. Your mind was one hundred percent on the job, and there, on the road, you were…you became…”

“Almost happy,” said Madelene.

Have you read ‘The Woman and the Ape’? What do you think?

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Book Review – The History of Danish Dreams by Peter Høeg

April 3, 2026 by Vishy

After reading ‘Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow‘, I decided to read another Peter Høeg book, ‘The History of Danish Dreams‘. This is his first book.

This story tries to describe how Denmark changed through the 20th century through the eyes of some of the characters and their descendants. There is a count who hates the way modern advances are changing the world. So he tries to freeze time in his estate and stops all the clocks. There is a woman who runs a newspaper. It is very successful and she is able to predict all the future news. But she can’t read and write. And then there is a couple who are both thieves. They try to induct their son into their profession but, unfortunately for them, he is honest, and he refuses to steal. He even takes the things they’ve stolen and puts them back. These three are some of the fascinating characters who are featured in the book. What happens to them and to their daughters and sons and to their granddaughters and to their grandsons as Denmark goes through major changes in the 20th century is described in the book.

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Peter Høeg’s writing is beautiful, the book is experimental and inventive, the story is charming, the humour is wonderful. There are fantastic events and coincidences which sometimes border on the magical. But this book is not for everyone. Sometimes it requires deep concentration, a careful attention to detail, to appreciate the humour and the inventiveness and the intellectual pyrotechnics that Peter Høeg delivers. Sometimes the book was hard going because of that. But I’m glad I got to read it.

Sharing some of my favourite parts from the book.

“And here I have to pause for a moment. From this point onward certain problems arise in writing Maria’s story: I would like to depict her as a coherent individual – well, in one sense or another we are all coherent – but this proves to be impossible. It has something to do with the writing of history. History is always an invention; it is a fairy tale built upon certain clues. The clues are not the problem, not even in Maria’s case, where they consist of what Anna and Adonis remembered and what Maria herself remembered, together with the school register, then the police reports, and later the files of the child welfare committee, and later still other pieces of information to all of which we will return. These clues are pretty well established; most of them can literally be laid on the desktop for anyone to handle. But these, unfortunately, do not constitute history. History consists of the links between them, and it is this that presents the problem. And the link is especially opaque when. as here, we are dealing with the History of Dreams, because the only thing that anyone – and that includes me – can use to fill in the gaps between history’s clues is themselves. In the case of Maria Jensen, the problem becomes pressing because it is not possible – at least not for me – to cover all the gaps, not even roughly.”

“He stayed on at Sorø in an effort to combat the process of dissolution. He stayed on because he hated – more, feared – the thought of things falling apart and proving to be incoherent. He stayed on because he could not absorb the fact that he no longer belonged here at the school and in its grounds and in the assembly hall and in the big, sunken bath where, once a week, there had been compulsory communal bathing. If there had been anyone in whom he could have confided, he would have said that at Sorø he had learned about Eternal Values and the Significance of the Individual and Human Fellowship – and here he was, discovering that even the fellowship of the academy could be dissolved, from one day to the next, and all the familiar faces fade from view. Next year it would start all over again, with the message being imparted to new faces, and he, Carsten, would be forgotten, even though he had received an A-plus in every subject and the collected works of Voltaire as a prize for diligence.”

Have you read ‘The History of Danish Dreams’? What do you think about it?

Posted in Book Review, Danish Literature | Tagged , , | 4 Comments »

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