The Whimsy Bookworm: A Book Blog from India

 Hello Loves!  This weekend finds me reading two pretty amazing books.  One a young adult coming of age story, set in two time periods. The other a collection of beautiful short stories set in New York City and LA.  I am enjoying both my reads very much and all I want to is read my books and hope for rain 🌧 this weekend.  Zen by Shabnam Minwalla is a mix of history, revolution, love and Mumbai ❤ I adore this world and it's people and a story set in my lovely city.  Table for Two by Amor Towles, I cannot believe it's taken me this long to read this author. His writing style is truly beautiful and simple and deep all at once. I especially love the stories set in New York. I am just starting off on the LA stories and looking forward to it. 

  Book: Heartstopper Vol. 5  Author and Illustrator: Alice Oseman  Pages: 336  How Long it Took Me To Read: An Hour  Plot Summary:   Nick and Charlie are very much in love. They've finally said those three little words, and Charlie has almost persuaded his mum to let him sleep over at Nick's house ... But with Nick going off to university next year, is everything about to change? By Alice Oseman, winner of the YA Book Prize,  Heartstopper  encompasses all the small moments of Nick and Charlie's lives that together make up something larger, which speaks to all of us. Review: I binge read the first four volumes back in 2021, right before the series premiered on Netflix and I loved it- like everyone else on the planet. These books are just so warm and wholesome and sincere and the characters seem to painfully real. What I love most about these books is that the teens in these books feel and act and talk and come across as real teens. Confused, un...

  Book: Terminal 3  Author & Illustrator: Debasmita Dasgupta  Publisher: Penguin India  Pages: 110 How Long it Took Me To Read: Under an Hour Plot Summary:   It's August 2019 and Khwab Nazir is waiting to board the plane at Terminal 3 of New Delhi International Airport. Set to represent India at an international jiu-jitsu tournament, Khwab nervously looks towards her unknown future. She also reflects on her complicated past-of growing up against the insurmountable difficulties of life in Kashmir. Between happiness and emptiness, desire and grief, penance and peace, Khwab has endured. She has a dream that life will be a paradise, one day. Breathing against the backdrop of conflict, Terminal 3, is the story of the everyday people striving to live their dreams in the Valley. Things I Liked:  1. This is a story we really need to hear and hear more of. People living in difficult situations and somehow holding on to hope and dreams and working on turning...

  Book: Nine Liars Author: Maureen Johnson Pages: 457 Read on: Kindle  Read in: ~5 hours  Plot Summary:  Senior year at Ellingham Academy for Stevie Bell isn’t going well. Her boyfriend, David, is studying in London. Her friends are obsessed with college applications. With the cold case of the century solved, Stevie is adrift. There is nothing to distract her from the questions pinging around her brain—questions about college, love, and life in general. Relief comes when David invites Stevie and her friends to join him for study abroad, and his new friend Izzy introduces her to a double-murder cold case. In 1995, nine friends from Cambridge University went to a country house and played a drunken game of hide-and-seek. Two were found in the woodshed the next day, murdered with an ax. The case was assumed to be a burglary gone wrong, but one of the remaining seven saw something she can’t explain. This was no break-in. Someone’s lying about what happened in the woodshed...

  Book: Five Survive Author: Holly Jackson  Pages: 389 Read on: iPad Read in: ~4 hours  Plot Summary:  Red Kenny is on a road trip for spring break with five friends: Her best friend - the older brother - his perfect girlfriend - a secret crush - a classmate - and a killer.   When their RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere with no cell service, they soon realize this is no accident. They have been trapped by someone out there in the dark, someone who clearly wants one of them dead. With eight hours until dawn, the six friends must escape, or figure out which of them is the target. But is there a liar among them? Buried secrets will be forced to light and tensions inside the RV will reach deadly levels. Not all of them will survive the night... Things I Liked:   1. The premise was very interesting! I have read and immensely enjoyed the  Good Girls trilogy by Holly Jackson and so, this book, set over a night during a road trip where six high scho...

 Hello Loves!  Getting back to sharing my favourite reads of 2022.  Before we jump into adult fiction and historical fiction and literary fiction, I thought let's go age wise and get the kid lit and YA books out of the way. I didn't read a whole lot from this particular genre but the ones I did read I loved a lot and they deserve a post of their own.  So let's go.  In no particular order, here are some my favourite books from YA and Kid-Lit:  1. I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys: I adore everything this author ever writes. She exclusively writes historical fiction, set in turbulent times usually and from the perspective of young people. This book took us to a part of the world and a time period I knew next to nothing about, apart from the very, very basic facts. I recommend pretty much all of her books and this one is so so good.  I have a done a full review, so I won't go on about it. You can read it HERE .  2. Heartstopper Vol. I to IV by Alice...

  Book: This Golden State  Author: Marit Weisenberg  Pages: 372 Read on: Kindle  Read in: ~4 hours  Plot Summary:  The Winslow family lives by five principles: 1. No one can know your real name. 2. Don’t stay in one place too long. 3. If you sense anything is wrong, go immediately to the meeting spot. 4. Keeping our family together is everything. 5. We wish we could tell you who we are, but we can’t. Please—do not ask. Poppy doesn’t know why her family has been running her whole life, but she does know that there are dire consequences if they’re ever caught. Still, her curiosity grows each year, as does her desire for real friends and the chance to build on something, instead of leaving behind school projects, teams, and crushes at a moment’s notice. When a move to California exposes a crack in her parents’ airtight planning, Poppy realizes how fragile her world is. Determined to find out the truth, she mails in a home DNA test. Just as she starts to settle...

  Book: Last Night at the Telegraph Club  Author: Malinda Lo  Pages: 366 Read on: Kindle  Read in: 3 hours  Plot Summary:  Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father - despite his hard-won citizenship - Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day .  Things I Liked:  1. The premise of this book sounded  really  interesting. A historical fiction novel with a focus on the Chinese American community at the  height of the 'Red Scare' of the mid-1950s. A teenaged lesbian protagonist. There are very few books out there, if ...

 Hello Loves!  Since I listed my favourite Children's Books yesterday, today we look at some of my favourite Young Adult Books I read in 2021.  I really like the list I have curated here. A mix of India and elsewhere.  Amazing books, good for teen and great for not-teens.  Let's get started.  1. The Truly Devious Series by Maureen Johnson: OK this is a little bit of a cheat since it's three books instead of one, but this whole series was read, well binged in pretty much one swift week. Three books all great.   This series revolves around a cold case from 1936. Iris Ellingham and her daughter, three-year-old Alice, left for a drive on a  spring  day in 1936. They never returned home. Iris' husband, industrialist and millionaire, Albert Ellingham, left no stone unturned to find his wife and daughter, but to no avail. Ellingham Academy, the special school for gifted children and home to the Ellinghams, which is still open after a...

  Book: As Good as Dead (Book #3 in the ' A Good Girl's Guide to Murder' Series)   Author: Holly Jackson  Pages: 464 Read on: Kindle  Read in: 4 hours  Plot Summary:  Pip is about to head to college, but she is still haunted by the way her last investigation ended. She’s used to online death threats in the wake of her viral true-crime podcast, but she can’t help noticing an anonymous person who keeps asking her:  Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?   Soon the threats escalate and Pip realizes that someone is following her in real life. When she starts to find connections between her stalker and a local serial killer caught six years ago, she wonders if maybe the wrong man is behind bars. Police refuse to act, so Pip has only one choice: find the suspect herself—or be the next victim. As the deadly game plays out, Pip discovers that everything in her small town is coming full circle . . .and if sh...

  Books: Truly Devious, The Vanishing Stair and The Hand on the Wall  Author: Maureen Johnson  Plot Summary- Truly Devious:  Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.” Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym “Truly, Devious.” It became one of the great unsolved crimes of American history.  True-crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novel...

 Hello Loves!  What good is a weekend if one doesn't spend it immersed in a good book or two?  Yesterday, i.e. Saturday I spent my day driving around the hills and didn't get much reading done.  Perfectly fine!  So today I was determined to finish my current read: A People's History of Heaven by Mathangi Subramanian.  I finished it earlier this evening and I liked it, quite a bit. It's a mix of multiple stories and so many fiesta and strong women.  More on it later.  Then I was looking around and picked up my Kindle to see if it needed charging and quite by chance started reading a new book. Once I started I couldn't put it down!  The Secret Life of Debbie G by Vibha Batra & Kalyani Ganapathy:   It all started cos I wanted to mess with the Invincibles (the superbrats). #SorryNotSorry. But one thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was hitting out at everyone, even the Incredibles (the geeks) and the Invisibles (the losers). Se...