Firefly Lane was about the friendship between Kate and Tully.
This book, Fly Away, being the sequel to Firefly Lane, portrays how different people in the novel react to the death of Kate. Though it ends on a somewhat positive note, the whole book is very depressing. The adverse reaction of Tully and Marah was gloomy, and a majority of the book spoke about it.
Many scenes from the previous book were repeated, which wasn’t very appealing.
Johnny and Kate’s daughter Marah is a very irritating character, and the author has done a good job of portraying the character well. Marah has a mean streak and succeeds at hurting both her dad and Tully. It made me think a lot about parenting and why some children become problematic. Could the way Marah turned out to be blamed on anybody? Could there be a universal solution, one-answer-solves-it-all to troublemakers? Parenting is a tough job. Can parents be blamed for how children turn out in their future?
Despite Johnny’s best efforts to take care of the family, Marah goes astray.
The part that described the life of Tully’s Mother, who was Cloud/ Dorothy, was way too detailed, which I felt wasn’t needed.
I did not enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed Firefly Lane.
 

The third book in the Quartet series, THE MESSENGER is a powerful tale with a beautiful message to the world.
What would happen if the earth, wind, forests, flora, and fauna were gifted with powers with which they could retaliate or turn their anger towards us? The beautiful Blue Dot that provides us with abundance is completely being ill-treated and is almost being destroyed. Humans do not understand and acknowledge the weather that we are being bestowed with. Sometimes we see the wrath of nature, sudden earthquakes, cyclones, storms, cloudbursts, etc and we conclude that this is the impending doom. I once watched This show by David Attenborough and was saddened by how evil we humans are! We continuously spoil the earth for our greed, and the ever-increasing human mouths to feed. The main culprit is commercialization and the forever need for space to live.
The Messenger has characters from the previous two books, and they are settled in a place called the village. Many people in the village have different powers. The character Matty from the previous book is a protagonist of this book who seems to be a teenager here as this story takes place many years after the first and the second book. This village and Kira’s village (from the previous book) are separated by a big forest and Matty is a person who knows his way through the forest and acts as a messenger between the two. Matty is taken care of by the Blind Seer, who is Kira’s father.
A very beautiful aspect of the village is that they accept people with all their ‘so-called’ flaws and see the beauty within the person.
What happens in this book? Why do I talk about pollution, angry earth, you should read it to know about this yet another amazing dystopian narrative by Lois Lowry?
Can't wait to read the last one in the Quartet!

Have you ever heard anybody sing and wondered what if they live forever and keep singing new songs now and then? How can we treasure the immense artistic wealth that some people are bestowed with? How can we preserve something valuable? If it is inanimate, you can lock it up in a vault, but what about people with immense talents? How can these talents be treasured forever? Can we build a sanctuary for them?

Would you like to live in a society where everything is perfect, (the definition of perfection would be as per the creator)? What is perfect according to you?
Can you imagine a perfect community where every family has one daughter and one son? A community where everyone has well-defined work, and they have clarity about what they need to do in various situations. Even people are matched according to their energy levels, intelligence, etc., and are married. A community where they have birthmothers, whose job is to give birth to babies and give it to the community. The community works on certain set rules and children learn various tasks assigned for every age. Things change when a child turns 12. That’s when they are assigned their roles in the community based on their inclination or earlier performance. The worst part is that they don't have certain feelings, or memories and live in evenness. They can't see colour and can't experience many other feelings.
The Giver is the story about a family in a Utopian society (?) A mom, a dad who is a nurturer, a son named Jonas, and a daughter Lily. The main character in the book is Jonas, who is assigned a role when he turns 12. The Role assigned to Jonas is very intriguing and propels the story forward very fast as I wanted to know what comes next.
The worst part about the society was that they see no colour, everything is grey to them as they have been genetically modified so that there is evenness! They are not allowed to have any emotional outbursts.
I found it cute that they had a fixed age when a child could ride a bicycle before which they are not allowed to touch it.
To enjoy happiness one must know what it feels to be sad, to enjoy comfort, one must know what are hardships, and even to enjoy food one needs hunger.
The book, I felt, was partly like Handmaid's Tale ( the birth mother part), partly like Divergent (where everybody was assigned roles too) and had an Orwellian touch to it too.
I somehow enjoy dystopian books. The weirdness in this genre always produces contemplative stories that question so many aspects of society.
Another aspect of the book that I really enjoyed was the concept of memories. In a computer, memory is stored on a hard disk. Would it be nice if we had a hard disk if all the memories of all the human beings stored in it?
This is such a beautiful story with a very ambiguous ending.
Very easy to read and it’s a MUST-READ!
 

I know we don't judge a book by its cover. We can't assess a book after reading a few lines. A few pages? A few Chapters? I could say nothing about this book. Even now I am in a haze. Not sure what to make of it!
I closed the book and looked out of the window, and I contemplated: What did I read exactly? It's profound. It just makes you think and look at life and death from a different perspective.

The book is neither plot-driven nor character-driven. The narrator digresses into various topics like feminism, climate change, loneliness aging, etc. through various anecdotes. For example, there is one in which a cat narrates its story. The cat talks about people who are not kind to it and finally finds people who are nice and caring. I found the cat narration Murakamiesque!

The book has quaint humour and genuine pathos that’s indescribable! I think she has tried to present the serene topic of death with a mild undertone by sprinkling unrelated yet interesting topics here and there, or else this topic is too heavy

A story involves a couple who fall in love and the years of married life, parenthood, and life, in general, make them fall out of love. The lady narrates that her husband had a smile on his face when she got cancer. I found this husband very intriguing. I liked the fact that she acknowledged him, and she knew that he loves her and did things to help her through her illness. I think he was smiling because finally, he got something to help her out with?!
They say women are very difficult to understand. I feel one can't be so hypocritical about it. It differs from person to person. Sometimes it's difficult to understand men too!

One story is about a guy who marries a lady just purely for her beauty. As she grows old, she accepts it, and she refuses to dye her hair black nor does she like putting on make-up. She says that she knows her husband doesn’t like it and that she knows that he is having an affair. I have heard this story from many women. They feel so threatened once they have had babies or they put on even a little bit of weight. What makes them feel so insecure and why don’t men feel insecure with respect to marriage? I know many women from many societies do not easily break up their relationships once they have children whereas the majority of men do not bother.
 
The cruelty of death, suffering, and illness is the crux of the discussion though. What do you think about euthanasia? Can we eradicate existential suffering due to debilitating illness by Euthanasia? Is it ethical?

A quote from the book “They are young, and they are beautiful—even in anger, they are beautiful, the way young people are” made me wonder. Don’t we all always idealise our childhood? There are teenagers out there who are yearning to become adults and do whatever the adults do! The old people want to be young because of their inability to do things that they used to as youngsters.
 
It's not an easy book, though the language is simple. The topics that it deals with are so intense, that one feels inundated. It deals with many issues that confront humans with specific existential issues.
I did not read the blurb because it was a book chosen by a wonderful reader of our book club and she always chooses amazing books and it turned out to be one too!

 

Does a surrogate mother never feel attached to a child that she delivers? A mother will always love the newborn. I feel it’s the magic of the umbilical cord that connects the mother to the child. It’s a gush of mutual love.
The final instalment of ‘THE GIVER’ quartet is a journey of this mother, Claire, who undertakes a journey to hunt down her son. Claire is from the dystopian society mentioned in ‘THE GIVER’ where people are assigned roles once they turn twelve. Claire was assigned the role of a birth mother and her role was to deliver babies. They artificially inseminated her and when she got pregnant and was about to deliver, some complication occurs due to which she is moved out of the birthing center and she is moved to a hatchery unit. She delivers a baby boy, and she only remembers that the baby has a fixed number of 36. Her motherly instincts push her towards the baby which is taken care of in the nurturing unit.
I admired the resilience and the courage that Claire sported and the determination that propelled her towards the baby.
The story has many twists and turns and moves between different places that have different cultures and spirits. Having come from a place that is deprived of colours, animals, birds, etc. Claire is alarmed, scared, and has mixed
The final book knits together all the events from the previous parts. Suddenly coming across names that you have read earlier rings a bell and makes you refer to the earlier books and then there is an ahh moment.
A character that I detested in books three and four was the ‘Trademaster’. I think he was symbolic of a capitalist, who keeps trading to gain more for himself, portraying the selfish, greedy mentality.
The four books in this series have dystopian societies and the ultimate victory of empathy and humanity is what I enjoyed the most. All the books are amazing, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. 

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
How much can one sleep in a day? 10 hrs.? 12 hrs. maximum? In this era of chatting, social media and browsing through the net, we often find people huddled on a bed or sofa with their devices. It is enough to make us lethargic and remain inert. Makes me recall Newton’s First Law of Motion which states ‘If a body is at a state of rest or in motion, it will remain at rest or keep moving unless it is acted upon by an external force.’
This book is about an unnamed narrator who takes a year off to sleep. She is depressed due to the death of her parents, and she resorts to taking innumerable sleeping pills, due to which the book sounded like a pharmacopoeia, although it doesn’t talk about the side effects or precautions that go with the medication. Although her parents were the detached kind, who didn’t bother much about their child, the narrator is saddened at the sudden, one-after-another death of her parents.
“Those outings to the mall were the few times we had any fun together. My father was joyless, too, at home. He was dull and quiet.”- from the book
Sometimes not having parents who have fun with the child or have a balanced equation with or a nonchalance towards them, can result in children who grow up to be adults who are depressed, unsociable and introverted. Bonding with children is so important. They are humanised by parental hugs and words of wisdom
Although I know a few terms relating to sleep, I made a conscious effort to look up the exact meanings of the terms somniac, narcoleptic, and somnophile.
The narrator keeps taking these sleeping pills prescribed by a psychiatrist ( I felt the psychiatrist needed a psychiatrist herself). She chooses a not-so-involved psychiatrist so that she wouldn’t question her much and would keep prescribing medications. Suddenly after a year, she stops all the medicines.
How could she just stop the medications? How come there were no side effects? After so much sleeping, she didn't develop muscular atrophy? Withdrawal symptoms? Well, it’s a book and the author can use the force of her pen to change the state of inertia.
The protagonist or the narrator is quite a detestable character, a narcissist, and a misanthropist. She has rich parents who leave a lot of wealth, and she feels that she doesn’t need to work. She has a bulimic friend and a caustic boyfriend, both of whom are not very involved with her.  
The writer is brilliant and a protean thinker. It is not easy to write so much about sleeping. If you are looking for a light positive read, then this is not your cuppa. This book is depressing with a bitter protagonist and at the same time a well-written oeuvre.

MY REVIEW OF METAMORPHOSIS BY FRANZ KAFKA
The word Metamorphosis brings the image of a lifecycle of a butterfly, where the beautiful butterfly emerges from a not so pretty larva and a pupa. In this book, Gregor Samsa turns into an ugly creepy crawly one fine morning. The whole story revolves around the fact as to how he feels and how his family treats him in this form.
The question that popped in my mind the moment I read the first line was how the family would know that this was Gregor Samsa? Why didn’t it occur to them that this insect could have eaten Gregor up? Why didn’t they try to shoo the insect away or call others so that they could take the insect to some forest? All these questions arise when we take this situation at its face value, but Kafka had a deeper message to convey. He wanted to portray how people change when there is a change in their life. Gregor was the bread earner of the family, and everybody had got used to it, a set lifestyle. When Gregor was rendered useless due to his transformation, the mom, the dad, and the sister took up various jobs. The pressure of the family otherwise was completely on Gregor.
Gregor’s life as a vermin was piteous. Nobody understood him or appreciated him earlier also for all the hard work he put in for the family. We don’t know much about Gregor’s life when he was a human other than he was an industrious travelling salesman.
It’s a fantasy, absurd fiction novella. It's interesting and a must-read!

The title of the book drew me towards itself. I found the title very intriguing. It made me wonder why any book would have this title. There is a scene in the book where the author describes how the pigs squeal when they are about to be killed.

The story is about a boy named Patrick, and his mother Ellen. This story takes place around the first free elections of Namibia.

Patrick is the son of a very rich man named Howard. His brother Malcolm, gets killed in an accident. Patrick is devastated by his brother’s death and he gets mentally disturbed and emotionally traumatised after some brutal killings while in the army. His parents divorce each other after Malcolm’s death and thereafter his mother has transient relationships with many men.
Patrick and his mom set out on a journey to Namibia. This journey makes Patrick revisit his past. His mom currently is in love with a much younger black guy, Godfrey, who is a political activist. Although the novel touches upon the issue of race, it is only transitory.

I liked the character Patrick. He is a guy who is sidelined for not being able to play rugby and go hunting like his brother and his father. Why should anybody feel bad about not being able to play a game or do things that others do? Being judgemental, just because someone is not good at a particular field is harsh.
People go by certain generalisations. Men shouldn’t cry! Men should be strong-hearted. Girls are sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice. When people are not confined to these ‘so-called’ categories, people look down upon them! WHY?

The book is packed with themes like emotional turmoils, painful memories, mental health, political transitions, revolution, and war.

The author is an expert at weaving a very engaging tale brimming with simplicity yet with an undercurrent of subtlety. It is a  beautiful novel that covers a very meaningful journey.
This is the third book that the author has written and he wrote his first book at the age of seventeen. This book won the Central News Agency Literary Award. 

The story with its unique narration spans more than three decades, four funerals and changes in the political situation. It moves from apartheid to a post-apartheid nation. It portrays the decline of the White Afrikaans Swart family. The main characters are Ma (Rachel), Pa (Maine), and three children: Anton, Astrid, and youngest daughter Amor. Salome is the black maid of the family who is sparingly mentioned in the book. It depicts the invisibility of the person and her being irrelevant to the family.

The book is about changes. Changes in the nation and changes in individuals due to the passage of time. How a death in the family affects people and we see the true colours of people at this moment. People react very differently to such a situation. The oddity was that all the family members met mainly during these funerals.

Galgut projects a very dysfunctional family here. The father, Maine promises the dying mother, Rachel, that Salome would get her own property. How long does Salome have to wait to get her property, which is rightfully hers?

Though Amor is portrayed as a person with some mental illness, I liked her for her altruistic nature and paramount commitment.

The book signifies the relevance of life and death and how humans at any level are discriminatory towards others.

We discussed this book in our unofficial book club and one of the members created a unique opportunity to have an online rendezvous with the author Damon Galgut himself. We thoroughly enjoyed dissecting the book and discussing every aspect of the book. He enumerated all the thoughts and points that led him to write this masterpiece. When asked about the unique narrative, the author explained that it was meant to be a cinematic narrative, the way on a screen a camera zooms in or out. It’s like having discordant voices talking over each other. The author has a fondness for stationary and loves a particular Parker fountain pen that was gifted to him by someone. He has been using this pen for the past twenty years and believes in writing first and then typing it out.

Our discussion moved from apartheid to climate change to water scarcity to character analysis to various situations in the book. He told us about his love for Faulkner’s books, particularly ‘As I lay dying.’  We just didn’t have enough of the discussion. The meeting came to an end, but we were all filled with a sense of pride at having met such a brilliant, and unassuming Author.