A review by sam_riccio
Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi
5.0
My first Hindi mythology book, aside from the small snippets that I've read in different books and it was DELIGHTFUL.
Aru Shah is 12, lives in a museum with her mother, who is always busy with work and leaves her often. So, it's just Aru more often than not.
I don't know anything about these myths, and so everything that I got from this seemed to be the best thing in the world to me for this mythology.
The reincarnated siblings who count as demigods, the stories that come with who they were in their first lives, and their parents.
The closeness of the families in this book is one of my favorite parts: Aru started out thinking that she was completely alone, and she meets Boo, who brings her to Mini, and then the two get to meet the gods and go see the Otherworld and have what feels like an actual sort of family moment with Death.
It's the little things that really got me; how someone would make a casual mistake and they would bring it up in the way a family would - Mini walking into the telephone pole, or Aru saying something to Aiden and Mini roasting her and then getting the other gods at their schooling lessons to roast her because the girls are all of their little nieces right now.
Death is a feminist because his child has been reincarnated as a female and he wants to be there for his kids and does whatever it is he can to cheat the system so the girls don't run themselves down before they can stop The Sleeper.
Also, speaking about The Sleeper; he was originally just a man who wanted to be with his wife and daughter and its such a tragic story that everything keeps going back to how family ties you together, but only certain family gets to live because some are tied to fate to try to destroy the world.
I was just, really excited about this book, and I put it off for so long because I knew it was going to be amazing and I was going to want to do nothing but sit and read them all at once but I didn't want to wait for the entire series, so I tried to wait until ALL of them had come out just to realize when I finished One that Four wasn't out yet and I had doomed myself.
There is no way that you can pick up this book, read it through, and decide that you don't want to get your hands on all of the others as soon as you can.
Aru Shah is 12, lives in a museum with her mother, who is always busy with work and leaves her often. So, it's just Aru more often than not.
I don't know anything about these myths, and so everything that I got from this seemed to be the best thing in the world to me for this mythology.
The reincarnated siblings who count as demigods, the stories that come with who they were in their first lives, and their parents.
The closeness of the families in this book is one of my favorite parts: Aru started out thinking that she was completely alone, and she meets Boo, who brings her to Mini, and then the two get to meet the gods and go see the Otherworld and have what feels like an actual sort of family moment with Death.
It's the little things that really got me; how someone would make a casual mistake and they would bring it up in the way a family would - Mini walking into the telephone pole, or Aru saying something to Aiden and Mini roasting her and then getting the other gods at their schooling lessons to roast her because the girls are all of their little nieces right now.
Death is a feminist because his child has been reincarnated as a female and he wants to be there for his kids and does whatever it is he can to cheat the system so the girls don't run themselves down before they can stop The Sleeper.
Also, speaking about The Sleeper; he was originally just a man who wanted to be with his wife and daughter and its such a tragic story that everything keeps going back to how family ties you together, but only certain family gets to live because some are tied to fate to try to destroy the world.
I was just, really excited about this book, and I put it off for so long because I knew it was going to be amazing and I was going to want to do nothing but sit and read them all at once but I didn't want to wait for the entire series, so I tried to wait until ALL of them had come out just to realize when I finished One that Four wasn't out yet and I had doomed myself.
There is no way that you can pick up this book, read it through, and decide that you don't want to get your hands on all of the others as soon as you can.