The Nature of Stories

The thing about stories are that they give you a world of your dreams in which you can live and do the impossible things that you wish you could do. They give you a freedom and your imagination a free reign. You take to your heart your favorite characters, and slowly and secretly you live their lives as if their life was inseparable from yours, as if they were but one. You feel their anguish and their happiness, you cry with them and you laugh with them. Their emotions are your emotions, their success yours, their failures your failures. That is why we love them, we embrace them and we crave them.  That is we are hurt when they are hurt and that is why we flood our eyes when their heart is laden.

Have we not all begged in agony when we knew that our hero was walking into a trap, have we not consoled our hero when he blamed himself for the sad demise of his trusted companion, have we not sneered and cursed the villain who tortured our hero’s beloved. Is it the hero that makes him so amiable to us, is the story that drags us towards it and them submerges us in its intoxicating world or is it ultimately us the reader who has taken upon his heart the courage to lose himself and decide to adore and love the story and its hero. Somehow the story, the hero and the author are immaterial to the reader.

The reader weaves his own story every time, he makes his own castles and give his heroes the face of his creation. He crafts the enchanted forest and despicable moors.  The story of any story is the creativity and imagination of the reader not the creativity and the imagination of the author. It’s the reader who weaves the story and who gives it a life force that is capable of animating the whole world and it’s ultimately the reader who breathes life into the story and makes it come alive. It is the reader who fathers the story, the author is but a guide who lightly guides him through the altogether unfamiliar world the reader has conjured up. That is why a truly great story is one that is open for interpretation in as many ways as there are fertile minds there in the world.

Book Review : Redemption by Karen Kingsbury

“The perfect travel companion, blissfully light and engaging”.

Redemption by Karen Kingsbury is the first in the Redemption series, A trilogy revolving around the Baxter family, a highly religious and orthodox family living in Bloomington, Indiana. Redemption, the first book in the series redemption revolves around Kari Baxter. When Kari Baxter finds out that her husband, Tim Jacobs a college professor who is having an illicit affair with his understudy, her whole world falls apart. She is further devastated when he asks for a divorce. The much distraught Kari takes to religion and its echelons to save her and her marriage from this crisis.

Redemption is the story of betrayal and as the name of the book gives away 'redemption', Karen reiterates that the troubles of Kari are not enough reason to throw away a otherwise perfect marriage away and that marriage like all relationships require care and effort. Redemption is by far Karen's effort to convince the reader that even perceivably devastating betrayals in marriage can also be forgiven and a that a stronger marriage can at times be redeemed from these ashes.

Karen builds up a fairly elaborate family, each member with their own problem and in midst of her narrative she occasionally takes a detour to ramp the reader up on the background stories of the rest of the Baxter. Even then she forgets many main characters and fails to build them up, unfortunately they just remains as names and references. The most unforgivable of those is the story of Angela, Tim's lover. Even though she is central to the story she is conveniently forgotten. The story and its over reliance on religion and not on reason and the fact that the very story that is central to the book, the story of how the reconstructs their broken marriage is ill developed and leaves gapping holes and enormous in-continuity in the narration.

Otherwise the 360 odd page page-turner is a fairly light read, its one book that could keep you company during a short journey and would provide you with reasonable amount of entertainment. It however doesn't reach up-to the authors reputation of being an inspirational masterpiece.

Available at : Amazon.in

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