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: Millennial Apocalyp$e 

Millennial Apocalyp$e -Zane Brown – Book Cover

Book: Millennial Apocalyp$e Why You and Other Millennials Are Tracking Toward Financial Disaster and How You Can Avoid It

Author: Zane Brown

Genre: Non-fiction, business, self-help

Review copy: Reedsy Discovery

Available at: Amazon.in

Recommended: Loved It

This a thought-provoking and insightful book for our times, with relevance for a wide audience interested in the psychology of the millennials.

The fear of recession and the current doldrums that our economy is braving is directly impacting millennials. The sudden dissemination of the Big Tech bubble and its ripple across several digitalized segments is causing a lot of concern with markets in a tizzy. In this well-timed and relevant book, financial strategist Zane Brown, and psychologist Dr. Donalee Brown address the conditions, fears, and proposed solutions around the financial well-being of millennials.

The book is primarily targeted towards an American audience with many references to laws, socio-economic situations, and even research centered on the American ecosystem. However, most insights are valid for an international audience and informative for all who want to understand the global economy and millennial psychology.

I recommend this book as a thought-provoking and insightful study of the world of millennials. It helps us understand how their sense of entitlement, risk aversion, internet addiction, self-aggrandizement, behavioral biases, distrust in banks and traditionally organized financial organizations in favor of cryptocurrencies, and even financial PTSD – all of this crumples up the modern social fabric. This book explains how late marriages, high student debts, delayed or no real estate investment, and zero retirement plans are keeping millennials on the precipice of a financial disaster.

The book offers advice and aims at pulling millennials out of the rut of choosing to remain uninformed and risk-averse while making unhealthy financial decisions. This is an important book for a wide audience – parents, educators, leaders, and of course, the young generation, who are not getting straightforward answers on what 2023 and beyond hold for the world. We are living in a stressful time – a book that acknowledges this and offers succor in practical ways while validating the concerns of our generation – is a must-read book.

The research, analysis, examples, and explanations make this an engaging read. However, the descriptive content is often repetitive, as if to meet a certain word count. A better way to handle this would have been to include graphics, tables, line drawings, or caricatures, which this book lacks. Yet, this is a necessary book for its advice related to deep analysis, personal connections with professional and financial advisors, delayed gratification, and patience for the millennials.

Book Review: My Name is Cinnamon

My Name is Cinnamon – book cover

Book: My Name is Cinnamon (Hay House 2022)

Author: Vikas Prakash Joshi

Genre: Young Adult Fiction

Review copy: Provided by the Author

Available at: Amazon.in

Recommended: Must Read

A colorful yet touching story of an Indian teenager

My Name is Cinnamon by Vikas Prakash Joshi is a young adult novel on a sensitive theme. The story refreshingly starts with a football match and childhood fun and frolic. It slowly courses through the harsher travails of destiny. Cinnamon, or Roshan, is a lanky and dreamy teenager, who is puzzled by questions about his identity. He keeps filing them “away in his ‘Questions to ask later’ folder” until the need to know the answers overwhelms him.

Amidst pranks and banter with friends to woes and worries of academics, we get an engaging story of adolescence. It’s also a story about the charms and struggles of parenting. There are insights into Bengali culture, particularly food, and Marathi daily life. No Indian tale is complete without the quintessential train journey, an uncomfortable bus ride, and quirky neighbors and relatives. In this story, Kolkata emerges in all its beauty and uniqueness, and so does a quaint township in the Indian hinterlands.

The book reminds us of adventures written by beloved Indian writers like RK Narayan, Sudha Murthy, and Ruskin Bond. The drawings and caricatures add another flavor to the book. Even with all the colorful narration, I felt the book needed some editing that could have endowed it with a more literary appeal. For me, some incidents were predictable despite the humor, drama, and pace. However, the book makes its mark in the genre of young adult fiction and holds the promise of a sequel or even a graphical or serial novella about Cinnamon, our teenage protagonist.

My Name is Cinnamon has wholesome messaging around the touching topic of adoption. Books for Indian children are always a treat and it’s great to read one that bundles up positive social ideas and lesser-known information. You can grab a copy to capture the nostalgia of being a teenager and to learn whether Cinnamon gets the answers he has been seeking. In the end, you will definitely walk away with some inspiring and useful information that raises awareness and makes the book a worthwhile read.

Additional links shared by the author:

Interview in Greece: https://eatdessertfirstgreece.com/2021/08/21/vikas-prakash-joshi/

Interview in The Hindu: https://bit.ly/3lmDFwT

Interview by TEQ Book Club: https://bit.ly/3DUwE0s

Interview in Pune Mirror: https://bit.ly/3yMIR4R

International School of Kenya: Following dreams challenging

About the Book: noisyvision.org/2021/10/28/my-name-is-cinnamon-a-book-by-Vikas-prakash-joshi/

Promises

The memory is still ablaze
Of delicate papyrus etched
With indelible poetry;
Pages glowing in a luminous
Chemistry of the first gaze
A medley of words whisper,
Buzzing neon promises
That flutter like fireflies
In a momentary daze
Until they are all gone!

Voiceless

I had a voice, loud and strong
I had an opinion, proud and sound
Then, they started appearing
The trolls, with words so wrong
I gave it a fight until I could not
I didn’t have it in me – to commit
To belligerent, infinite explaining
To shove for a place in the medley
I muted myself, all thoughts shelved
I had nothing more to perceive
No more breaking news to see
It didn’t matter to me who prevailed
Or whose entire world derailed
For no one cared enough to listen
To what the sane had to convey