Books in '15 | Scion of Ikshvaku

Scion of Ikshvaku by Amish Tripathi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Having their hopes spurned by Chetan Bhagat, Ravinder Singh and others, the Indian readers turn to Amish. His advantage is the genre in which he writes, it's way different than those of the authors I mentioned. He has an open field and nobody to compete with (none that I know).

That deer hunting scene reminded me of a similar scene from the movie 'Avatar', apologising to the animal after killing it.

Dashrath: good man but a bad king. Raavan: bad man but a good king. Nice analogy to start with but it would fail eventually.

The narrative was hasty at times, the mythological facts were relentlessly bombarded, not in a way people would find convincing.

The entire Roshini episode should have been left out (especially those gory details). The only purpose it served was to rally Manthara against Ram, which didn't seem a strong enough reason as compared to all other possibilities: one of them being that Manthara was already a confidante of Kaikeyi.

Something was missing in the book. There was no thrill. I was just skimming through the chapters. So many POVs steal the show away from the protagonist. It should have been restricted to a few people only. There was no hook at the end of chapters to keep things interesting, to make me anticipate about what was coming up. Nothing made me pause and read a sentence twice. However one caught my eye:

"When the axe entered the forest, the trees said to each other: do not worry, the handle in that axe is one of us."

Everyone loved the Shiva trilogy, I included. Since there is no manuscript related to Lord Shiva (none that I know about, and even if there is one, it's not so popular) the story sank easily. However, everyone has read Ramayana or seen it on TV. So this time it was much of a perilous task for the author to alter the storyline and the original characters backed by a scientific, rather than a mystical approach, and still make people like it. The author seemed so engrossed in building the mythology (and sometimes trying to link this book with the previous series) that the character of Ram suffered. He didn't come up as a strong main character.

I'll wait for the next book to find out how Sita got kidnapped, which shouldn't have been left out. And what's the dispute between Vashishtha and Vishwamitra. And how Raavan ended up being the King of Lanka when he was just an army general. A military coup would be the obvious answer, still......

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