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Showing posts with label Fiction: Regional. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fiction: Regional. Show all posts

Monday, August 1, 2011

Romantic Full Moon Bride Tours The Web

Full Moon Bride
By Shobhan Bantwal

Review by Lily Azerad-Goldman, B.F.A. is an artist and a children's author.

The Full Moon Bride is Shobhan Bantwal’s fifth book. Her first four books tackled serious and often complex topics of interest to contemporary women – especially women in India or of Indian culture. In her latest book she takes us inside the experiences of a young woman who is going through the arranged marriage process.

About The Full Moon Bride

What makes a marriage—love or compatibility? Passion or pragmatism? THE FULL MOON BRIDE is a compelling story that explores the fascinating subject of arranged marriage, as young Indian-American attorney Soorya Giri navigates the gulf between desire and tradition.

In choosing between two very different men, Soorya must reconcile her burgeoning independence and conservative background. And she must decide what matters most to her—not just in a husband, but in a family, a culture, and a life.

About Shobhan Bantwal

Award-winning author Shobhan Bantwal calls her writing “Bollywood in a Book”—romantic, colorful, action-packed tales, rich with elements of Indian culture—stories that entertain and educate. Shobhan has five published novels by Kensington Publishing, with a sixth slated for 2012. Shobhan can be contacted through her website: www.shobhanbantwal.com or Facebook.

Since 2002, Shobhan's articles and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications including The Writer magazine, India Abroad, Little India, U.S. 1, Desi Journal, India Currents, Overseas Indian, and New Woman. Her short stories have won honors and awards in fiction contests sponsored by Writer's Digest, New York Stories and New Woman magazines. Shobhan can be contacted through her website: www.shobhanbantwal.com or Facebook.

What People Are Saying –

Shobhan Bantwall is certainly a prolific author with her fifth book, The Full Moon Bride just released. After writing about serious social issues as India's dowry system, female-fetus abortions, the repressive lives of some women and political violence in India, she has chosen a lighter subject, the Indian-American immigrant experience. Her compelling characters and fine writing will keep readers enthralled.

Women's Fiction with a touch of romance and sometimes a little mystery is what Shobhan Bantwall is all about. She enjoys incorporating the rich elements of her Indian culture, religious beliefs, myths, legends, superstitions, foods, scents, recipes, clothing, accessories, language including slang, history, geography, and most anything that she feels adds to entertainment and knowledge.

Moreover, she beckons her readers to travel with her on adventures where they not only experience different places, tastes, smells and feelings through her characters, but also perceive their thrills, joys, sorrows and triumphs.

Written in the first person, The Full Moon Bride is charming and engaging. Soorya Giri has everything, wealth, a rich doting Indian family and a successful career. Despite the fact that Soorya is intelligent and a successful lawyer, she is very shy and at age thirty has not yet been on a date, let alone been kissed! She lacks the self-confidence of American girls. Thanks to her Indian upbringing and customs, she considers an arranged marriage, without giving it a second thought! Under the auspicious purnina (full moon) her parents invite a prospective groom and his family. She believes she will be rejected because of her “homely” appearance, as has occurred previously.

Much to her surprise, she likes the charming prospective groom Roger, but her self-confidence is such that she does not believe he is attracted to her. Perhaps, he will only like her because of her money and rich father. He has grandiose dreams of putting up a play on Broadway that require a substantial investment.

A game of cat and mouse ensues with Roger. Does she or does she not like him? Does he truly love her? And at about the same time, she is attracted to a widowed black lawyer. We cannot wait to see who is going to gain her heart.

The author mixes this love triangle with Indian culture, cuisine and customs from the old country. She brings to life her characters with a lot of bantering dialogue and authentic descriptions of their lives in America. Join Soorya on her bumpy journey to find that nebulous, elusive thing called “love!”

Bantwall's new novel explores the complicated patterns of self-confidence, love and attraction, trying to balance Indian customs and American experience. She has created credible characters, with all their vulnerabilities, flaws, quirks, virtues and vices! The characters were so true to life that I found that I missed them a lot when I finished reading The Full Moon Bride! Maybe they will come back in Ms Bantwal's next novel. This one is a real page turner, don't miss it!







Title – Full Moon Bride      

Author – Shobhan Bantwal

Author's website link – http://www.shobhanbantwal.com 

Genre or category – Women’s Fiction, Suspense, Ethnic Fiction

ISBN – 978-0-7582-5884-7






For much more information about Shobhan Bantwal and Full Moon Bride, you can visit her website http://www.shobhanbantwal.com and you can order your own copy at http://www.amazon.com/Full-Moon-Bride-Shobhan-Bantwal/dp/0758258844




----- The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love. That includes authors who want to share their favorite reviews, reviewers who'd like to see their reviews get more exposure, and readers who want to shout out praise of books they've read. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page. Reviews and essays are indexed by genre, reviewer names, and review sites. Writers will find the search engine handy for gleaning the names of small publishers. Find other writer-related blogs at Sharing with Writers and The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor. As a courtesy to the author, please tweet and retweet this post using this little green retweet widget :

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

First Novelist Brings Us Katrina and Her Disaster-Battered Sisters in Other Parts of the Country

Title: After the Floods
Author: Bruce Henricksen
Publisher: Lost Hills Books
Genre: Novel, 212 pages, perfect bound
ISBN: 978-0-9798535-0-0

Reviewer: Susan Larson in the New Orleans Times-Picayune
Susan Larson can be reached at slarson@timespicayune.com
Permission to reprint this review has been granted by Lynn Cunningham of the Times-Picayune. lcunningham@timespicayune.com

"A Whimsical Look at Poet-Katrian Exile"

In his first novel, After the Floods, former New Orleanian Bruce Henricksen tells a tale of two cities--New Orleans and Cold Beak, MN--both recovering from disastrous floods, both filled with folks trying to make a comeback. And not just people--add some crows and dogs into the mix.

The novel opens with George and Ruby surveying post-Katrina damage on Laurel Street. "Laurel is the street where Ruby's heart had been broken, broken with the branch that snapped in the storm, sending her eggs splattering to the sidewalk." The two fly north, a couple making a fresh start.

Billy Boischild is another New Orleanian who heads to Cold Beak, leaving behind a life in New Orleans in which he engaged in experiments in scientific faith implantation. He rents a trailer and starts examining his life, engaged in constant electronic spiritual debate with God and a nun called Sister Ann . . . But life in Cold Beak is wide open, as Billy finds . . .

The characters move in and out of one another's lives, looking for love and redemption, and sometimes, blessedly, finding it. Henricksen brings such fey charm to this spiritual comedy, with tender feeling for all these searchers, flying from despair toward hope, and ocassionally back again. Sometimes the reader feels she has wandered into Garrison Keillor's Minnesota, sometimes John Kennedy Toole's New Orleans. It's a short, thoroughly enjoyable flight of fancy, filled with sweet wisdom about the way we lean on--and crash into--one another.


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The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, founder of Authors' Coalition (www.authorscoalitionandredenginepress.com). It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love--and that includes authors who want to share their favorite reviews and reviewers who'd like to see their reviews get more exposure. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page.