Tag: storytelling

Book Review: Freddy’s Magic Garden

Freddy’s Magic Garden -Angelin Dayan- Book Cover

Book: Freddy’s Magic Garden

Author: Angelina Dayan

Genre: Biographies, memoirs, stories

Review copy: Reedsy Discovery

Available at: Amazon.in

Recommended: Must Read

Get yourself a little something this Valentine’s Day – A delightful, warm, and fuzzy book that tells of feline adventures and is brimming with utmost love and affection.

Freddy’s Magic Garden by Angelina Dayan is a warm and fuzzy novella, perfect for the winter months. It contains stories filled with much love and affection for our furry friends. It is about friendship, guardianship, and hope. The book has been written with much tenderness and the feelings ooze out of the pages, instantly warming the heart.

With human and feline narrators, the storytelling is lively and can make for a good bedtime read for children. The cat portraits give faces to the names of frolicky balls of fur. A more vibrant portfolio of the cats in different settings around the house and garden would have made this into an exotic coffee-table book. The book is a testimony of how caring for fur babies, tugs at your heartstrings and can keep you up at night and days, in anxiety for their well-being. The commitment to care for another living being is difficult and must only be taken up if one will go the extra mile.

The stories of the cats, as told in their voice, are engaging and humorous. You feel drawn into their world. From their experiences with the breeders to waiting for their human family, to antics and escapades, these cats have a full life of adventure. In Uddy’s escapades, the author seems to channel Orwell’s Animal Farm, including a visionary piglet. There is a reference to Elon Musk’s feline alter ego, and it’s hilarious – “What you need, Uddy is to go to Mars. But hurry up before that human gets ahead of you, that Mewlon Husk,” he advised. I would have loved more farm stories, but it was a small part of the larger feline saga.

This is a fabulous book to understand the world of cats, particularly Maine Coons. As it is with life, the cats face losses and challenges, but with love and care, they bounce back. With the largesse of the heart, even a small home can become a heaven for little bundles of joy. The cat family grows by leaps and bounds and there is much joy to be shared and observed. Freddy’s Magic Garden is a perfect book for animal lovers and if you can not get enough of these stories, then like me, you can top it up with a 2022 Netflix film – Inside the mind of a cat.

Book Review: Crafting Great Stories

Crafting Great Stories -Gerald Gallagher – Book Cover

Book: Crafting Great Stories

Author: Gerald Gallagher

Genre: Non-fiction, writing

Review copy: Reedsy Discovery

Available at: Amazon.in

Recommended: Must Read

A concise guide to starting with the art of crafting impactful stories – ideal for students, beginners, leaders, and writers of all genres.

Storytelling is a buzzword not just amongst creatives and academicians but also in corporate boardrooms. Off late, there is an emphasis even on delivering impressive stories around bland data charts. Effective storytelling requires skills in story writing and narration. While there are several books on the subject, Gerald Gallagher’s Crafting Great Stories is a succinct and handy guidebook. It gets straight to the basics and carves an easy-to-grasp set of rules and practices based on research.

Gallagher summarizes all the key elements of story writing and supports them with ideas that can act as writing prompts for a beginner. He builds his book on the affirmation – “The author is mighty, indeed, having the ability to create worlds unlike our own.” His book is then a simple toolset to get a writer started on this unique journey. Crafting Great Stories has valuable information for those who are exploring the art of storytelling and a ready-reckoner for those wanting to hone their craft. My copy of the book has several highlighted takeaways for reference.

Apart from the rules related to good writing, such as outlining, plotting, characterization, setting, and tying it all up neatly together, Gallagher talks about an important subject – writer’s block. He offers advice on how to tackle writer’s block and acknowledges, “…writing burnout is a real and sometimes terrifying thing.” He talks about first deciding on the narrative type you want to build. On this canvas, one can add brush strokes and colors that give a complete picture of an outline. Sometimes, where to start from is the toughest question and Gallagher gives sound advice.

He has given numbered lists and cheat-sheets while providing ample material to create your own. There is information on story arcs and subplots, secondary characters, subvert expectations, and how the story’s theme differs from the moral. I found it interesting that the moral should be woven “into your writing mostly during the middle section of your writing.”

I appreciate the author has dedicated an entire chapter to the art of editing and publishing, which I always believe breathes life into any piece of writing. I also enjoyed the chapter on creating settings and backdrops, and even treating them as characters. This is an important book and a must-have for all writers who want to learn the dynamics of creating impactful stories.

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