Book Giveaway Results: The Sea of Innocence by Kishwar Desai

Winner of the Book Giveaway of 'The Sea of Innocence' by Kishwar Desai is .........

Muddledup a.k.a Shweta Ravi

Congratulations Shweta! Please send me your complete postal address in India with pincode, so that I can arrange to send the book to you.  (I could not find your email ID.)
Hope you will enjoy it :-) 

And a heartfelt thank you to everyone who participated. 

Book Review: The Sea of Innocence by Kishwar Desai

Title: The Sea of Innocence

Author: Kishwar Desai

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Pages: 264

Price: Rs 350

Genre: Fiction / Thriller /Crime / Women issues

Rating: 6/10

Format: Paperback

‘The Sea of Innocence’ is the third book in the trilogy by Kishwar Desai. The first one was ‘Witness the Night’ and the second one was ‘Origins of Love’. The only connections between the three are the main protagonist Simran Singh, and the fact that each one of them deal with a women-centric issue. ‘Witness the Night’ was about female infanticide while ‘Origins of Love’ was about Surrogacy and IVF.

About the Book (from the blurb):

Goa, south India. A beautiful holiday hideaway where hippies and backpackers while away the hours. But beneath the clear blue skies lies a dirty secret…

Simran Singh is desperate for a break and some time away from her busy job as a social worker-come-crime investigator. And so the unspoilt idyll of Goa seems just the place - white beaches, blue seas and no crime. 

But when a disturbing video appears on her phone, featuring a young girl being attacked by a group of men, she realises that a darkness festers at the heart of this supposed paradise. And when she discovers out that the girl is Liza Kay, a British teenager who has gone missing, she knows she must act in order to save her.

But first Simran must break through the web of lies and dark connections that flourish on these beaches. Everyone, it seems, knows what has happened to the girl but no one is prepared to say. And when more videos appear, and Simran herself is targeted in order to keep her quiet, the paradise soon becomes a living nightmare.

My thoughts:

Kishwar Desai does not beat around the bush. Her first few lines are always the attention-grabbers. She comes straight to the point (or the case).

The main protagonist in the series, Simran Singh, is a 46-year old social worker (who really ends up being a detective for the cases she gets embroiled in). Simran Singh is long past conventional marriageable age, loves her smoke and destresses with alcohol. She is headstrong but gullible at times; though her heart is in the right place. She has a penchant for courting risks by meddling into cases related to vulnerable women, which usually also runs her into powerful politicians and inefficient police. Her family consists of her mother and an adopted teenage daughter, Durga (who was part of ‘Witness the Night’).

Quite evidently, the book has taken liberally from the much-publicised Scarlett Keeling case. You may read about the case here. Since it was dealing with sexual crime against women, the book also gives a lot of references of the recent Delhi gang-rape case and other such reported cases, which sometimes puts the narrative off-track. But clearly, author’s motive was to highlight the injustice meted out to women like Scarlett Keeling who have been victims of sexual violence and who are now lost into oblivion with several perpetrators yet to be brought to books.

Honestly speaking, the author had much to consider in putting all the strings together for this book. Having the protagonist on the crime scene; involving her in situations in which Scarlett was found dead; also incorporating the recent, much publicized Delhi rape case and other sexual violence reports; Simran’s pursuit of the case; inserting a romantic angle; and moreover, the setting of Goa had its own baggage like issues of locals against tourists, problems due to modernization, night life, surge in crime, the drugs mafia, et al. I felt there were a few unnecessary, cringe-worthy sequences about the sexual violence.

What I admire about the author is her ability to highlight a social, women-centric issue and weave a fascinating, fast-paced thriller around it. Perhaps it is her years of experience in journalism that helps her accomplish that. In retrospect, since I had read her previous 2 books, perhaps I had unrealistic expectations from the third one. But if you like this one, trust me, you will love the other ones more.

This book is not a masterpiece but like all Kishwar Desai’s books, it is a compelling read, woven around topical women-centric issues, and like always, it too strikes a note. As Smita also mentioned, the only issue with all of the author’s three books is that their endings do little justice to the fast-paced narratives. But having said that I feel this book will work for the readers who like thrillers or crime-based fiction.

Review Book courtesy: Simon & Schuster India
Image source: Amazon

Book Review:Origins of Love by Kishwar Desai

Title: Origins of Love 

Author: Kishwar Desai
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 470
Price: Rs 350

Format: Paperback
Genre: Fiction / Medical
Rating: 9/10

I loved Kishwar Desai’s first book Witness the Night. So, when I came to know about the release of her second book ‘Origins of Love’, I quickly checked it out and found the premise quite interesting. Both the novels are woven around women centric issues – first one on female infanticide and the girl child, while the second one is on IVF and surrogacy. The second book starts where the first one ends though there are no real linkages, and both can be read independently and in no particular order. In ‘Origins of Love’, the protagonist from her first book, Simran Singh, returns with the flourishing, murky world of IVF, surrogacy and stem cell research.

Dr. Anita and Dr. Subhash Pandey, with partner Dr. Ashok Ganguly, run a posh and successful IVF centre in Delhi offering IVF and surrogacy facilities to interested couples, which include gay and international clients. In one such attempt, a surrogate delivers an HIV positive baby, Amelia, and spells potential doom for the hospital.  Soon the commissioning parents of baby Amelia also die in a road accident during their trip to Rajasthan, causing double trouble for the hospital with no one to claim the child.

With the hospital’s reputation at stake, Dr. Anita involves her cousin, Simran Singh, the 40-something social worker, to unravel the mystery of how the child got the infection and also to find out her surviving family member, if any.

The IVF and surrogacy business is flourishing in India, resulting into the mushrooming of several such centres across the country. Couples who do not want to carry the child themselves or who are not able to do so or the gay couples., etc; are flocking the centres in large numbers that includes a huge demand from international clients who opt for India owing to availability of surrogates at a very low cost, and absence of any strict laws safeguarding the interests and health of the surrogates.

‘Origins of Love’ has a myriad of characters, parallel stories which converge later and sub plots which propel the story at a fast pace, keeping the reader hooked. Kate, who wants to have a baby through surrogacy; her husband, Ben, who wants to explore adoption and who nurses guilt from his colonial past; the middleman Sharma, who arranges for surrogates and lures poor women into the vicious circle of surrogacy; sub-inspector Diwan Nath Mehta in Customs and Excuse Department, who gets embroiled in the business of supplying confiscated embryos to a hospital through his boss Nazir Ali; Edward Walters, the health conscious sperm donor; surrogates in the form of underage girls, women without children, women separated from their children, women who need money for family, et al.; doctors like Ashok Ganguly and Wadhwani, who want to stay ahead in the stem cell research because the future is there, even if illegal at the moment; politician couple, Renu Madam and Vineet bhai, who want a heir for their party – with such an interesting gamut of characters, the story moves forward at a fast pace and makes the book pretty unputdownable.

I admit there are some loopholes in the story, a few very naïve treatments and a relatively lame ending when compared to the high the book creates throughout its 400 odd pages; but overall, the book is interesting and accomplishes the task of putting the spotlight on the pitfalls of this lucrative business!

I am definitely picking up Kishwar Desai’s third book, which she hints towards the end, is on its way!

Image credit: Amazon