It is winter in North East. There is this long break of 2 weeks for Superbowl. It is that time of the year where things are bit slow. I was looking for a book in fantasy genre and found this Shiva trilogy by accident.
As per ths book, Ram Rajya is a wet dream of statists. It gives the impression that Ram's rule is complete Orwelian or Totalitarian in nature. The book also tries to re-inforce same staid statist ideas as golden standard of rule again and again. The author's scholarship is questionable. There is no suspense or surprise in any of the pages. There is no character development. I was hoping to have complete picture of Shiva by the end of the book, but i could get only a vague image ( It is like seeing NTR's face in every god's image in indian calendars). There is no character development on any of the main roles. How their past shapes present actions etc. All you get is very generalized ( romba over the top characters) that fit a popular/narrow bollywood narrative.
On top of all these obvious flaws in the book, it is highly plagiarized. Most of the fights or formations are straight cut and paste from Chinese/Japanese movies of the past. Tortoise formation etc.etc. Another glaring cut and paste job is from a book called Giver. In Giver, a totalitarian system lets you assign the professions based on your abilities ( obviously decided by the elder council). His Maika system is borrowed from this book verbatim. It is fine to borrow a concept and expand on it, but the author tries to extol its virtues, where as the concept itself is totally hated else where. ( I don't know how he justifies it as a great system, it is not as per the universal value judgement ).
It was a torture to read this crap, I will not be reading the rest of the books in this series. I will also not recommend any one to read this.
On top of all these obvious flaws in the book, it is highly plagiarized. Most of the fights or formations are straight cut and paste from Chinese/Japanese movies of the past. Tortoise formation etc.etc. Another glaring cut and paste job is from a book called Giver. In Giver, a totalitarian system lets you assign the professions based on your abilities ( obviously decided by the elder council). His Maika system is borrowed from this book verbatim. It is fine to borrow a concept and expand on it, but the author tries to extol its virtues, where as the concept itself is totally hated else where. ( I don't know how he justifies it as a great system, it is not as per the universal value judgement ).
It was a torture to read this crap, I will not be reading the rest of the books in this series. I will also not recommend any one to read this.