Book Review of the eBook, A Potpourri of Drabbles

Harshita's Book Cover


Book Title: A Potpourri of Drabbles

Subtitle: A collection of 100-word stories

Author: Harshita Nanda

The book Cover in white, with a border arranged with blue flowers, elicits a feeling of calm and serenity.  

What is a Drabble? 

Drabble is a new experience for me and tempting me, it was not even one a hundred. My curiosity prodded me to google it, and the answer is- it is a short work of fiction in one hundred words, less or more as the type varies.  

According to Writer's Digest, in a drabble. "Not only do you have to tell a story, but you have to do it quickly, barely letting the reader get their feet wet before they are back on the shore. It requires a lot of skill, patience, and -in my experience-editing to get a drabble of high quality out of a story idea." 

Since I have completed reading all one hundred, I can say something about the breaking the ice experience I got from Harshita's eBook.  

Each story felt like a butterfly lowering into my colourful spring garden of reading. Folding its orange wings spotted with kohled eyes, it rested on my shoulder, invoking a brisk of emotion and then fluttered away in the speed it came, soring heights into the wilderness, giving me a yearning for more. 

The haste and the uniqueness felt like it was a TV ad dealing with my sublime, and before I let my conscious mind wake up, it had bewitched me.

It was a short read. The language is sweet, and each word with ideas and meanings. Being minimalist in word use is not easy, which helps a writer in her creative journey.  

The Theme of the book:

A theme being the central idea in a book, Harshit's eBook deals with a potpourri of them-love, love-loss, greed, hate, neglect, women, cheating, kindness, goodness, badness, gullibility in the relationships, and so on.  

I can make a statement about each story, but in line with the scope of my review, I chose a few among them, not in any order.  

The Banyon Tree

A man bribing men to cut down the banyan tree plunged the village into the netherworld. 

It loaded a moralist enthusiasm in me that took me down the lane of nostalgic memories--to my home where I was born and grew up. During the monsoon months, my brothers and I cuddle around my grandmother. That was the time she told stories non-stop. We would sit around a wood fire to escape the cold and fear of the monotonous and heavy downpour raging outside. Each story she enthused us with kept a moral element in it.  

One example is the greedy family of the golden goose that slaughtered it to grab the ton of gold in its stomach and found only meat and blood. She allowed us questions at the end of a story. She adopted brevity as her style that kindled our eagerness and elaboration in answering our questions. How I have allowed the little concerns that budded in my mind to take firm roots in me as I grew up to make me who I am, without being aware of it, I think of it years later.  

A daughter-in-law commits herself to be the daughter of her husband's parents, who lament the loss of their son in 'A Big Loss.' The instinctual love of five-year-old Ryan for an orphaned puppy and cuddling it with a desire to give it shelter and care in 'The Love At First Lick." And a couple rekindling the love that connected those years ago, joining together in a walking routine in 'A simple Love Story.'

A husband finds his valentine in his wife, who poo-poohed the love celebration as rich people's business of throwing away money by cooking himself a surprise dinner in, 'I love you." A set of parents shining in the joy of their five-year-old daughter making triumph over an irrational foiba that restricted her within the walls of a home in Cocoon'.  

The parent's joy at seeing their five-year-old daughter winning over her irrational phobia that restricted her inside the walls of her home in 'Cocoon'.  

The aroma of the mango pickle sprouting the buds of memories livened the up collective practices of a people and longing for its loss over time in 'Pickle of Memories.

I recommend this book to anyone for the worth of reading it.  This book is published as part of the Blog chatter's much celebrated eBook Carnival.  You can download this book free from this link.

You can download the eBook I have published on the same platform free from the link Aching Hearts. 

My Twitter handle: @prasannaragh