Crossed & Knotted – Book Review

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Sutapa Basu is an Honours scholar from Santiniketan and holds a Masters degree in English Literature. Her professional career has seen her as a teacher, editor, and publisher. She has worked with renowned international publishing houses like Oxford University Press and Encyclopaedia Britannica. In the last five years of her professional career, she has launched 111 educational titles, 33 CDs and digital products, a language lab and a website. She has also developed and edited over 450 books over the last thirteen years.

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER : READOMANIA

India has traditionally been the land of storytellers and a lot of us have an inherent skill of creating good plots, stories and narrations. With a little encouragement and support, many more authors can be widely read. This is the essence of Readomania-an initiative that nurtures emerging stars of the literary world. Readomania is an online content discovery platform that brings to life a whole new literary world, with stories, authors, books and a lot more. We also have a publishing house that takes the best of Readomania from the online format to print editions and launches debut authors. Our focus is to bring to the market, new authors and novel concepts, a composite novel being one of them. Our previous book, Chronicles of Urban Nomads, a collection of short stories, was also an experimental publication. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Readomania is the talent hunt in fiction that goes a step beyond, nurtures talent and showcases it to the world, in the process, creating a powerhouse of content. Our website also has a lot in store for the reader. Since the content is edited and curated, by a strong team of editors, readers get quality reads on a platter. The variety on Readomania is impressively vast; we have romance, emotions, thrills, travel, humour and drama. Accessing Readomania makes for a perfect break of fifteen minutes from your daily grind. The website was launched in January, 2014 and is already very popular with about 3500 registered users, of which 300 members are active contributors and authors. The site also boasts of 800 online publications and more than three lakh page views till date.

REVIEW

Firstly, I thank The Book Club and Readomania for letting me read this book and review it. “Crossed and Knotted” is the first composite novel of India. It consists of fourteen stories that are written by fourteen different writers with different background. This aspect of the novel makes it all the more intriguing that how fourteen individual stories are linked together leaving the readers in awe.
The stories were heart-enriching and realistic and instigated curiosity about the characters. Each story succeeds in surprising the reader with its twists and turns. With each story, various human emotions come to life to which reader can connect himself. This book is a complete package of emotions which takes the reader on a ride of feelings like love, care, dreams, aspirations, frustration, greed and many more. Primarily set in India, it also highlights our hypocrite society and cliched mentality.
The characters are pulled out of real lives which make them all the more relatable to our lives. Their reactions are exactly like what we would have done if we would have been such situations.
The best essence of this novel is though everything may seem scattered or unconnected mid-way but at the end it comes out as its name suggests- Crossed & Knotted. Hats off to Readomania for bringing it together and Sutapa Basu did a fabulous job in compiling all the stories.
Though the language of the novel is simple but the writing style differs slightly with each different writer. Reader might take time