Wizarding School: Koldovstoretz, Russia
Prompt: Read a book tied to your roots
Format: Kindle

Set in Chennai, India, this book follows the lives of two bibliowomen – Neelambari Adigal and Kayalveli Anbuchelvan who own an antiquarian bookstore called Biblio in Adyar. The other protagonists of the book are collectors Nallathambi Whitehead and Arcot Templar, frenemies from the town of Katpadi in Tamilnadu. I picked this up precisely because of that – set in a city I am very familiar with and it was a fictional story about two Tamil bibliophiles and not only fit the prompt perfectly, but also piqued my interest quite a bit!

This book’s tagline is “A bibliomystery”, and mainly revolves around Richard Francis Burton, a British novelist, geologist, explorer, and colonial bigot (had to say this after reading about him). And while it is a mystery if you want to go by semantics, there is not a lot in this book in the lines of a plot. It is a non-fiction book about antiquarian book collection, collectors, enthusiasts, and printing aficionados disguised as a fiction book. There is absolutely no coherence, not much to call a mystery, and the vaguely interesting turns the story takes are very few.

The writing is also quite uninteresting, with forced plot twists, unnecessary adjectives, and dragging disjointed explanations. The author starts a story, goes off on a tangent about some other story, and comes back to the first, leaving the reading utterly confused – and I can tell you that I am not easily confused by plot points in any story.

While I did enjoy the notes about old authors, literature, their stories, collections, and sometimes the emotions associated with them, I thought that the author forces you to read these when you are anticipating a mystery – not cool!

The Raman Rating: ** (2/5 stars)