Krishna and the Lake of Souls | Anurag Bhatt | Book Review

PLOT: 1.5/5
CHARACTERS: 1/5
WRITING STYLE: 1/5
CLIMAX: 2/5
ENTERTAINMENT QUOTIENT: 1.5/5

Harry Potter is the best fantasy fiction I have ever read.

It is my strong belief that by penning the Potter series, J.K Rowling has done a service to the world.

I salute her for giving us this greatest work of literature, giving us history to cherish and fantasy to engross our children’s mind just like it did ours.

And so, simply thinking about somebody performing any kind of amputation on my beloved novel is simply revolting.

Anurag Bhatt, in his debut book, Krishna and the Lake of Souls has precisely tried to do that and the result, needless to say, is not convincing.

Krishna is a young boy of ten, who lives with his mother in the beautiful city of Nainital. Krish loves his life and his one true friend Sid, who is an orphan with no one to look after him.

Time goes by and one fateful day Krish is greeted by his uncle from Mussourie who has come to meet Krish on his birthday. Krish is really happy but what he doesn’t know is that his uncle has come to take him away to Mussourie for his better education and life.

He glumly goes along with his uncle to Mussourie, taking with him his best friend Sid and pet dog Jhumroo but leaving behind his mother. One fateful day, Jhumroo fetches a strange book from somewhere and brings it to Krish.

He finds it quite interesting, though, in a bizarre way and decides to read it anyhow.

But no sooner does Krish starts with the book, those strange things began to happen and he, along with his best friend and pet Jhumroo, finds himself in an even stranger world.

Krishna and the Lake of Souls is worth appreciation but only to the extent of making an attempt at writing something different and something more challenging than regular pulp fiction novels flooding the market these days.

Unfortunately, that is as far as good work goes. The novel is an ill-thought mixture of various previous works, the major portion having been taken from the Harry Potter series.

The characters are too shallow; there is no depth to their person or their conversations. This is sadly the case with most of the major characters – including Krish, Nishe, Shelly and others like Krum, Puma, the uncle and the aunt.

The language in Krishna and the Lake of Souls is also not up to the mark and there are a lot of grammatical, editing and other errors.

“We are lost” (in another world/dimension) is often quoted as “We have lost” and such kind of mistakes are anything but uncommon.

At many places, I felt that justice to characters and events might have been done if they were dedicated a few more pages.

Many times, no attempt has been made to explain the situations, the feeling or the events taking place and it is completely left to the reader to imagine and assume things and fill in the gaps.

All in all, I did not enjoy the book and sincerely hope the author will deliver us much better work in the next part of this fiction series. In this hope, I convey my best wishes and good luck to Anurag for his next book.