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May 20 • Book reviews & recommendations
Guess the book from its one ⭐ review...
This is historical fiction. All guesses are encouraged (no googling, though!).
This is meant to be fun. Don't be dismayed if you disagree with the review. Any spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors are copied directly from the review. I’ll post the correct answer tomorrow (20th May 2026)
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Seven hundred pages of historical fiction would usually be a hard pass from me, especially something that is admittedly less ambitious in terms of its literary aims. But I am a fan of Malayalam fiction, particularly works that are socially engaged and in conversation with writers and thinkers throughout India. So I gave this a shot. Alas, this book was none of those things, except for the length. It was quite problematic in places: child marriage was romanticized, the legacy of Christianity was largely unexamined, the history lessons were rudimentary, and we had a few characters serving as white savior figures. In conversation with others, I found I wasn’t the only one picking up Gone With the Wind vibes. [Author] has indicated in interviews that he wasn’t interested in engaging these topics on a political level; he was just out to tell a good story. I find that to be a very limiting approach and not at all what I look for in literary fiction. The unfortunate reality is that great works from Kerala and elsewhere in India struggle to find publishers outside the country, even after they are translated. I hope people who enjoyed this, for whatever reason, will be inclined to read work from the region instead of work merely about the region.
⭐
What do you think? What's the book? (In this case, if you can think of only the title, but not the author, that's ok!)
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Guess the book from its one ⭐ review...
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