Smorgasbord Fantasia

For ages, we have been pining for that huge gap in our lives left by the excellent Game of Thrones ( minus that terrible ending, of course!) and Amazon Prime has been trying hard, to get us hooked onto multiple different options. The grandest of them all, is of course The Wheel of Time currently running on Prime ( more on this later!) but we've seen a few more ambitious attempts.  Carnival Row - Season I (2019) falls somewhere right in the middle. Luscious worldbuilding, fantastic visuals that looks like a Dickensian Fever Dream, earnest performances and an overstuffed ambitious storyline.  Does it qualify to fill in that void? Nope, not by a long measure. but by itself, without drawing comparisons, Carnival Row is not a bad series at all, headlined by Orlando Bloom and several others playing key roles in the first season.  The story is a gas-lamp fantasy set in a world populated by both humans and the ‘fairyland residents, ‘fae”. As the story opens, the fairyland has be...

 Lijo Jose Pellissery became a household name in Kerala, after this cult-hit movie - Angamaly Diaries. And then the oscar-nominated Jallikattu made him famous across the country. Ee Ma Yu, his second outing ( streaming on Netflix India, by the way) was also a stellar movie that dealt with the themes of death, grief and afterlife. And then he made this movie - Churuli (means a Loop, in malayalam)  Frankly, when I saw the trailer last year, I was extremely excited for the possibilities, but now that I have seen the movie, to say am equal parts awe-struck and frustrated would be the least of it. LJP offers no explanation for this exercise in absurd-art-bizzare-cinematic extravaganza. The critics are divided in their verdicts, some of them laud the dazzling vision and the cinematic treatment of this narrative and the others are quick to trash it as exceedingly absurd, a exercise in  That it's a loop - a never ending one, set across time/space/other dimensions is very clear b...

Thanks for the ARC of Every Star a Song by Jay Posey from the Harper Fiction Publicity team and this in no way affects my opinion/review of the book.  Jay Posey has always been a favorite author of mine, as I have fond memories of his first series The Duskwalker series and having run interviews/giveaways for the same. His new series Ascendance has been a stunningly original one, focused on melding science fiction and fantasy elements overlaid with some deep philosophical tones and great action.  In the first book Every Sky a Grave of the critically acclaimed Ascendance series by Jay Posey , we were introduced to Elyth, a woman adept in the Deep Language, that could be used to kill 'planets' and her fateful meeting with the Eth-Ammuin, a fugitive of the law named Varen Fedic, whose beliefs convince her to actually break away from the workings of the First House and become an 'Exile' on the run. We were introduced to the political machinations of the Hezra-Ka, the de-fa...