Pralay: The Great Deluge by
Vineet Bajpai
(This book review is a part of "The Readers Cosmos Book Review Program and Blog Tours", for details visit The Readers Cosmos")
“Even death is afraid of the White Mask…”
1700 BCE, Harappa – The devta of Harappa has fallen…tortured and condemned to the dungeons of the dead. His murdered wife’s pious blood falls on the sands of the metropolis, sealing the black fate of Harappa…forever.
2017, Banaras – A master assassin bites into cyanide, but not before pronouncing the arrival of an unstoppable, dark force. A maha-taantric offers a chilling sacrifice.
325 AD, Bithynian City (modern-day Turkey) – Unable to foresee the monster he was untethering, an extraordinary monarch commissions a terrifying world-vision spanning millennia.
1700 BCE, East of Harappa – A mystical fish-man proclaims the onset of Pralay - the extinction of mankind. The Blood River rises to avenge her divine sons.
What happens to the devta of Harappa? Is Vidyut truly the prophesied saviour? Who are the veiled overlords behind the sinister World Order? What was the macabre blueprint of the mysterious emperor at Bithynian City?
I quite enjoyed Harappa by Vineet Bajpai and was excited to be picking up the sequel. I'm afraid while it was interesting, it didn't manage to grip me as book one had. Pralay starts right where Harappa ended and one thing I can't complain about is the pace of the story. It's fast and something exciting is constantly happening. there are no dragging parts in the book and I'm glad for that.
"You could take away their homes, their lands, their loved ones, their wealth and everything they held dear. But you could never take away one thing from human being.
Hope.”
This story is constantly moving from past to present. We have three timelines merging and unlike book 1 I found it a little abrupt here. In Harappa too there is both past and present but I found the transitions between the timelines were clearer there. But with Pralay I felt there the author was switching between timelines too often and I found it distracted me from being fully pulled into the story.
The way Bajpai takes the plot would remind you of Dan Brown's books, especially The Da Vinci Code. I particularly enjoyed how the authors weaves the various storylines together to explain to us the present day happenings. I also enjoyed seeing many creatures from Hindu mythology that we don't generally get to see in fiction.
What I most enjoyed about the book was the action. It's thrilling and written in a way that had me at the edge of the seat. This book is very plot driven but then again I was upset about the abrupt ending and having to wait for book 3 to know what happens. While that ending was unexpected and quite exciting in way, I felt it was too abrupt and there for the shock factor.
I also felt there was a lot of info dumping when people tell the main character Vidyut about the various happenings of the past and about Hindu and Aryan culture. I also really wish this had been a duology and I actually thought it would be, until the surprise ending.
“Perhaps divinity is no greater than its believer. One would not exist without the other.”
Some quotes like the one above really caught my attention.
An equally thrilling sequel as Harappa but lacked in the fluid plotlines that Harappa had. I felt the book had a second book in the series syndrome and while the plot IS interesting, I would have liked to see a bit more character development and less info dumping.
View all my reviews
Comments
Post a Comment