Neha's Notebook

The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Swaying and pulsating with pipey-hot spice descriptions, syrupy-emotive narrative, portrait-worthy characters and beautiful storytelling, The Mistress of Spices is a novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakurni, the Indian-American writer and poet. Tantalizing, enchanting, charming and bewitching, the novel is a work of fiction, most-appropriately falling into the category of magic realism fiction. But apart from all things magic, the book also ripples with romance, and croons with the fragrance of feelings like courage, intuition and following one’s heart. The novel, fundamentally is rooted in the connection that plays between human mind and the psychological healing power embodied in different Indian spices. The Mistress of Spices is a novel depicting the story of a young woman who is born gifted with certain magical powers. The story takes the reader through a spectacular journey of how she navigates the discovery of her magical pow...

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger is one of those books that one may read over and over again, and never get bored. It clangs and jingles with the outpourings of sentiments, sentiments which erupt from the pellmell of the juvenile years in the life of a boy named Holden Caufield. Written in a 1st person narrative, the book gushes with the tohubohu of his adolescence and boyhood. Irked by who he calls as “phonies”, aka his fellow schoolmates, Holden decides to leave his school Pencey Prep. Stepping into the rubbly arena of the outer world, Holden seems to feel alienated, disoriented and miffy at its absurdity. The text that follows in the book elaborates upon these emotions in a tangle of brilliantly-crafted interior monologue that turns out to be utterly savoury to the reading sense. The book features an epistolary format, which means that it is written in the form of letters addressed to the reader and divided into chapters....