Sunday 21 October 2012

Faces In The Water by Ranjit Lal

 
Title: Faces In The Water
Author: Ranjit Lal
Number of Pages: 202
Cover Price: Rs. 199
Rating: 3.5/5

Get this from Flipkart (Rs. 199)





Ranjit Lal was born in Kolkata (1955), educated in Mumbai and graduated in Economics and Sociology. He is an independent writer and columnist for over last two decades. He has thousands of articles and lots of books on natural history and child psychology. According to him, his all books are for everyone from age 10 to 100.

About this Book:

It is a fictional story based on female infanticide - preference of male child.

The story is about Diwanchand family who is proud of two things - 1) having only sons in their family and 2) no one in the family ever fell sick. They give all the credit of this to a magical water from the well which is near their ancestral house.

Once, a son of this family gets to spend a few days in that house and wants to explore the area (especially the well) and what he discovers there changes his life and that of others for ever. There he finds the exact reason why there are only sons in the family. He sees the faces of his sisters who were drowned in that well because they were girls. The interesting part is that the ghosts of those girls start interacting with the boy and almost created a virtual world.

Although it is an adult topic, it is written in such a manner which makes it appropriate for children as well. The author has put lots of funny incidents related to magic, cyber world and lots of charm. I skipped some of such incidents because these were hardly moving the story. There is a bit of twist in the end of this story.

The description of the girls, their innocence, their expressions are narrated very beautifully and it made me laughed at sometimes as well as bought some tears in my eyes many times.

"What do you do when you discover an unspeakable truth about your parents?"
The book conveys a very powerful message and author has shown the injustice being done to girls very nicely, still there are lots of parts where I felt the story is loosing focus from its main subject. This is for all young and adults but I would like to recommend this book to readers of young adult fiction.




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