Review: 400 Days

400 Days by Chetan Bhagat
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Hooter: Chetan Bhagat building on his crime thriller genre with a missing teenage girl

Nabbed from under the same roof as an entire joint family, a teenage girl goes missing and a year done there is still no clue to where she is at. The police have given up but our protagonists - a detective duo that Chetan has been focussed onto building into a series with the past few books are on the case. Chetan continues to write in relatable English with simple story arcs that make him a popular read amongst the larger nascent English reading public in India with no pretence.

You could read the book or just wait till another Bollywood director out of ideas converts this into a movie with Alia Bhatt playing the role of Alia, Kunaal Roy Kapur playing Siddharth, Saif Ali Khan playing Manish, Neena Gupta as the mother in law - you get the gist.

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Review: The Supervillain Handbook: The Ultimate How-to Guide to Destruction and Mayhem

The Supervillain Handbook: The Ultimate How-to Guide to Destruction and Mayhem by King Oblivion
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: A sarcastic beginners guide to super villainy

Did this via Audible so the villain narration voice was the biggest bonus of the entire book. Taking examples from the comics world, the framework to be a supervillain is shared with the illogical reasons highlighted in a matter of fact manner.

From picking your name, your cape (what's a super villain without a cape), picking your origin story, your destruction objective, differentiating from bad people and villains , the need of heroes and villains as a symbiotic relationship.

A non serious fun read. You won't get to learn anything here or will you ? Mwahahaahhah

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Review: Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words

Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words by Andrew Morton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: The uncovering of a traumatic and torrid life under the facade that beautiful angelic ideal woman princess we all knew.

Under the strict and suffocating world of the institution of the crown, the fact this version of the story is out is a thriller and a story in itself. The story itself is a cherry on that cake. No one can imagine under that glamourous perfect life image she had to project was a life you wouldn't even want to wish for your enemy.

Andrew Morton does a brilliant job in capturing facets of Diana as a human - just another girl wanting to live her dreams but rudely cut short by the world around her. The fact that her true story had to be published as second hand information so as to protect her shows how out of control she was on her own life. All that glitters truly isn't gold fits perfectly for her story.

It has been 25 years since we lost her and the author shares an additional foreword talking about the journey that they went through to push this story out. Talking of her troubled childhood and how Prince Charles provided that escape and hopes of a better life but she never really fitted in to the Crown setup and expectations and slowly lost out in "three was a crowd in our marriage" highlighting the shadow of Camilla all through her courtship, marriage and divorce. For someone who saw so much pain, she tried making the world so much better for the rest through the power of media. Unfortunately it was the same media that obtusely in a way was a cause of her untimely death.

Whilst this is a great view of Diana as another human being and her story being as full of challenges and obstacles as the rest of us - even worse to an extent, the book spends a lot of time on her unhappy marriage which got me bored for a while. Her childhood and her last days are captured well and colorful, the unhappy marriage part drags for too long with the focus on it to a point that it feels repetitive.

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