ronica.wahi

  Review by Ronica Wahi Free from Pain – Exercise Book: Exercises to Improve Health, Increase Ability and Provide Vitality in Your Senior Years By Dr. George Ampat First published: July 17, 2021, Talita Koum. Pages: 96. ISBN: 9780995676947 Dr. George Ampat, a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at present, has happily created this useful self-help health resource for people aged 50 and above who suffer from musculoskeletal pains. Despite years of experience of performing surgery, Dr. Ampat explains in Free from Pain – Exercise Book the importance of avoiding surgery, whenever possible. As a good self-help tool should be, the book is easy to grasp. Both the explanations bit and the instructions on performing the recommended exercises for alleviating pains in bones and joints primarily are clearly and crisply given, making these explanations and instructions quicker to assimilate. The illustrations explaining the necessity of exercise and enlivening the metaphors that go ...

  Review by Ronica Wahi   And Beneath It All Was Love: My Path Back Home Again Through Breast Cancer By Aime Alley Card First published: February 3, 2016, Aime a Card. Pages: 274. ISBN: 9780692592465 “I am concerned that I was one of those people who appeared on the outside to sail through it. I want to be clear. No one who goes through chemotherapy sails through it. It’s brutal.” Through the above lines, Aime Alley Card, in the “Prologue” to her memoir And Beneath It All Was Love , makes an honest confession of how her experience of cancer treatment was. The entire memoir tells of her journey of fighting cancer – she doesn’t shy away from displaying her vulnerability and mental turmoil, and from talking about her fears and pain felt at different stages of the said journey. The memoir starts from just before she is diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer, a little over a year after her mother succumbed to brain cancer. The pain of and the fears arising from this...

  Review by Ronica Wahi Junction: Still Ticking (Junction Trilogy Book 2) By L.A. Evans First published: March 5, 2021, Lizzie Guttridge. Kindle Edition Pages: 405. ASIN: B08X4GPLPR The plot of this trilogy is unbelievable and outlandish, but there can be no doubt that this plot is also quite creative and unique, and that L.A. Evans is a gifted writer. Read detailed review on Junction: Time’s Ticking – Book 1 of this trilogy here . Book 2 tells the tale from the point of view of Zoe Young, and of course, takes the narrative forward too. To the credit of Evans, when the same incidents are related, it doesn’t seem like the reader knows just about everything already; there is much to learn about the whole affair. Certain instances are understood better as additional dimensions are revealed, as light is shed on some of the things that weren’t clear in their entirety or weren’t appreciated in the correct spirit in Book 1. The thriller runs at a good pace, with many twi...

  Review by Ronica Wahi   Primed for Vengeance By Gill D. Anderson Published: August 3, 2021, InHouse Publishing. Pages: 226. ISBN: 9781922578563 Life is uncertain. Life is unfair. Life is tragic. It is just much more so for certain people than for the rest. Among the ones who see life’s most brutal face are those who have a traumatized childhood. Among these are some who become damaged for as long as they live, damaged to the extent that they become a threat to others. One of the characters in Gill D. Anderson’s latest novel Primed for Vengeance thinks to herself, “… We can make choices in life; certain people just choose to stay in victim mode forever. ” (p. 112) Yes, this is the tale of a man – who renamed himself Butch to represent “the tough guy he needed to become, moving forward”- who’s been scarred too much and resorts to violent murders “to gain the recognition he deserved.” For Butch, trauma and what he considered repeated rejection become too mu...

  Review by Ronica Wahi   Behrupiya By Varsha Shrivastav First published: In parts, starting May 24, 2019, Pratilipi app. Edition reviewed: July 15, 2021, Ekatra – a joint imprint of Manjul and Pratilipi. Pages: 236.  ISBN: 9789390924622 Stunning is the word. Fast-paced, thrilling, and deftly crafted, with all threads tightly tying up as it progresses, Varsha Shrivastav’s Behrupiya (the word can mean “impersonator” but in the present context, it means “shape-shifter”) is a shining achievement. Full of suspense, and interesting twists and turns every few pages, it keeps the reader hooked till the final page. There is no slack – the suspense unfolds gradually yet there is so much happening that putting the book down is not going to be easy. Scenes keep changing as distinct parts of the whole are showcased. Hints are thrown intermittently of what is going to come up further, and this factor just ups the thrill and curiosity to know stuff. Shrivastav pre...

  Review by Ronica Wahi   Beparwah By Prakhar Sharma First published: Chapter/Episode-wise, starting February 27, 2019, Pratilipi app. Edition reviewed: January 1, 2021, The Write Order. Pages: 366.  ISBN: 9789390791538 Do you, as a reader, like to read romance? Do you enjoy imagining or reliving the thrills and troubles of attraction or love experienced during your school and college years? And can you read and understand Hindi? If your answer to each is “Yes”, you are likely to find Prakhar Sharma’s Beparwah (the word means “unconcerned” or “complacent”) an engaging book. Written in everyday language and style that youngsters today use – the diction and the intermittent use of phrases or sentences in English while conversing in Hindi, it is easy and fun to read. And this factor helps the reader connect quickly and well. Of course, since the subject - as mentioned above - is young people in love, the plot itself is relatable. Sharma picks up activiti...

Review by Ronica Wahi                        Land of Allusions By Andrew Davie First published: March 5, 2021, Independently Published. Kindle Edition published: June 29, 2021. Kindle Edition Pages: 104.  ASIN: B08XQXTY77 In the “Preface” to Land of Allusions , the memoir’s creator Andrew Davie writes about the two parts – Comedy and Tragedy – of this work: “Certain events in comedy could very well have been labeled as tragic, and many tragic events are hilarious in hindsight. It’s all a matter of perspective.” And this perspective is what Davie provides through a brave account of many of his experiences, experiences of the sort that most would shy away from relating. The subtitle helpfully informs of what the reader is going to find: “A Memoir about Online Dating, Jobs, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Surviving a Ruptured Brain Aneurysm/Subarachnoid Hemorrhage, and More.” The book contains a lot of cultur...