Just finished Kiranmala and the Chaos Curse

[conuly]

Now, normally I think blurbs along the lines of "X meets Y" or "for fans of W" are at best silly and at worst bizarre. 95% of the books compared breathlessly to Harry Potter aren't anything like Harry Potter at all, and as for the rest, I sometimes look at those book mashups and wonder if there isn't some sort of competition to pair the most unlikely books, both of which are only tangentially similar to the advertised book anyway - "For people who loved Pat the Bunny and Fahrenheit 451!" There's an audience for that book, but god if I know who it is.

The blurb for this series tells us it's "a world packed with action and adventure, perfect for fans of Rick Riordan and Soman Chainani", which is surprisingly apt, but at three books in I think I can say definitively - and with more justification than most of these - that this series is good for fans of A Wrinkle in Time. Indeed, I am almost certain that the author must be one of those fans.

Edit: Which is not to say anything stupid like "Indian Wrinkle in Time" or whatever. Kiranmala's story is her own, not anybody else's, and the more obvious inspiration is the one the author cites in every book - Thakurmar Jhuli. But I've never read that, and I have read Wrinkle in Time and note some similarity in themes.

Comments

[siderea]

I sometimes look at those book mashups and wonder if there isn't some sort of competition to pair the most unlikely books, both of which are only tangentially similar to the advertised book anyway - "For people who loved Pat the Bunny and Fahrenheit 451!"

Hmmm, fuzzy bunnies and totalitarian dictatorships..... Watership Down.

[jesuswasbatman]

A person on Dreamwidth who has since cancelled their journal read Watership Down for the first time as an adult, and did a hilarious "What I expected"/"What I got" meme where the first image was a saccharine-looking Disney spin-off children's book about the bunny from Bambi, and the second image was a picture of Leonidas from 300 waving a sword with a snarling rabbit head pasted on him. The first comment was "THIS!!! IS!!! EFRAFA!!".

[moon_custafer]

The Aeneid, but make it rabbits.

[greghousesgf]

I love you.

[conuly]

Okay, smarty-pants. Now do "Goodnight Moon meets The Hunger Games".

[siderea]

Itemizing every object in one's environment in a desperate bid for survival against terrible odds: The Martian.

[conuly]

...

50 Shades of Grey + Hippos Go Ber... no, that one's too easy.

[oursin]

The strangest I came across was 'In the tradition of James Joyce, Edna O'Brien and Flann O'Brien' - 3 writers, who apart from all being Irish, had nothing whatsoever in common (surprised Oscar Wilde wasn't there as well). I now wonder if it was one of those weird experimental mashup things, except at the time they were all in copyright and I think copy/pasting interwoven passages from each would have been a lawsuit in the making (as with Kathy Acker and Harold Robbins around the same period).

[conuly]

Did any of them have anything at all in common with the book in question?

[oursin]

That was the sort of description that inspired the reverse of any desire to read the book in question!

[james]

I mean weren't we all fans of Pat the Bunny?

[conuly]

Maybe?

[oracne]

That sounds excellent!

[conuly]

It is quite good.

[calimac]

Really, truly, and honestly: there was in the late 1970s, in the middle of the first big Extruded Fantasy Product boom, a book whose blurb said it was "in the tradition of The Lord of the Rings, Siddhartha, and Watership Down."

Needless to say, it didn't resemble any of them. (It was a retelling of the Grail legend.)

[conuly]

Was it good, at least?

[calimac]

Not particularly. Not a patch on The Lord of the Rings, Siddhartha, or Watership Down.

[dragonyphoenix]

Thought I'd read the first in this series but I was mistaken but I'd read the first Aru Shah and the End of Time. Didn't realize my mistake until I looked up The Chaos Curse on GoodReads and it recommended the Aru Shah series to me. Looking forward to checking out your rec. Yay, new series!

[conuly]

I like both those series, and I'm so glad we have two such different fantasy series featuring Indian-American girls.