Book Review: Ripples

I recently had an opportunity to read a book of short stories. It is called “Ripples” and is published by APK Publishers. It is a collection of forty-eight beautiful short stories by twenty-six women writers compiled together in a single book by Prashant Karhade.

As a reader and as one who occasionally dabbles in writing, I have always believed that fiction is nothing but a reality that we at some point of time in our lives have refused to acknowledge as one. What the society chooses to turn a deaf ear to, sooner or later finds its way back into the lives of its people and makes itself heard; dressed up in the alphabet and wearing the garb of a story. And we readily accept it then, in its more palpable form, allowing it to weave itself into the fabric of our lives and leave subtle lessons on the landscape of our psych.

If I could allow myself the use of just one cliché to describe this book, I would compare it to a rainbow of many colours. The stories in this book hold an immense power to trigger a range of emotions in the reader. I usually read a good book from cover to cover and finish it over a day or two. My reaction to this book was different. Each story left a distinct flavour and I found myself stopping between stories, trying to ruminate on what just happened in there and allowing myself to take a moment and bask in the feeling the story evoked inside me.

Though it is hard to pick a set of stories that left a lasting impression on me from amongst the forty-eight, there are some that stayed with me a little longer than the others. Perhaps it was only because I was able to visualize them more clearly on my mind-screen at that point of time. Stories like “Home Is Where The Heart Is”, “Fading Lights” and many others warm the heart and fill it with hope. There are some like “Wilted Dreams” and “Almost Heaven” that beautifully fill the reader with a faint sense of pleasure and then just when you start to snuggle deeper into the blanket of peace and contentment expertly cast over you by the author, they catch you unawares and leave you tingling with a strange stabbing sadness. While “The Oleander Flowers” and “Family Of Beauties” left me disturbed and angry, the stories “Never Mine But I Felt The Loss” and “My Brother Jai” left me feeling a deep penetrating sense of loss. There are stories with an eerie, thriller like quality like “For You, My Love” and “Atonement” that appeal to a certain part of the brain and then there are some that are written so beautifully that they are pure reading pleasure and one ceases to take notice of the genre they fall into. But having said that, this is my set of stories and I am sure when I reread the book in a few months’ time (which I most definitely will), I will pick up a few more and add to this set. That is the beauty of the book. Every reader of this book will most definitely be able to pick a handful of these stories and say with certainty that they made a difference to him/her.

All in all, it is a beautiful collection of stories – one that is surely not to be missed; not only for literary pleasure but also for the plenitude of unique human moments and the explosion of varied feelings the stories evoke in the reader.