Review: Heart Lamp: Selected Stories

Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hooter: Lighting emotions up!

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq lingers like a half-remembered dream from a coastal Indian afternoon, its stories slipping under the skin with quiet ferocity. Certain tales grab the raw pulse of longing and ache, turning mundane family frictions into something achingly alive, all without fanfare.

Take "High-Heeled Shoe," where an unborn voice chats with its mother across the veil of life—a strange, tender exchange that twists everyday grief into a visceral throb of what-might-have-been. It lands like a held breath finally released, full of shadowed whimsy that echoes long after.

Then there's "A Decision of the Heart," painting a household cleaved in two by a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law locked in absurd, petty warfare. The barbs fly with wry bite, but beneath simmers a deeper hurt of isolation, making you feel the weight of unseen resentments in every slammed door.

These pieces excel by letting emotions unfold in sidelong glances—wives enduring, children watching sharp-eyed, grandmothers scheming with sly grit—building a mosaic of survival amid southern India's tangled home lives. No sermons, just the hum of lived tension that mirrors your own buried frustrations.

Mushtaq's touch feels effortless, blending dry wit with poignant stabs that reveal human cracks without pity. It's a collection for moody evenings, where the heart's hidden lamps flicker on, illuminating feels you didn't know were waiting. Perfect reread fodder when real life bites back

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Review: The Priory of the Orange Tree

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hooter: The Queer thing about love in the time of dragons

A thousand pages of dragons, queendoms, and quietly burning faith—and somehow, The Priory of the Orange Tree still feels surprisingly intimate. You’re dropped into Ead’s double life as a secret mage guarding a queen who doesn’t know she’s being protected, Tané risking everything on Choosing Day for a shot at riding a dragon, and an empire betting its survival on women who can’t afford to break.

This is not a breezy weekend read; it’s slow in places, occasionally indulgent, and you feel every extra subplot and POV. But if you give it time, the pay-off is rich: cursed seas, political assassination attempts, an end-of-the-world dragon stirring—and at the centre of all that noise, Ead and Sabran building a fragile, stubborn love story that shouldn’t survive court intrigue, but somehow does.

Come for the wyrms and queens, stay for the orange tree that refuses to bear patriarchal fruit. In this queendom, even the Nameless One has to face the fact that love is the real fireproofing.

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Review: Yellowface

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hooter: Like watching a car wreck, directed by Wes Anderson.

Yellowface is a sharp, addictive publishing-world thriller that’s equal parts entertaining and uncomfortable. In a freak accident, a white washed out writer is around a highly accomplished Asian writer when she dies. She has an opportunity to take her top secret book script and pass it off as her own to revive her career. It becomes a roller coaster ride after that.

Slipping into June’s messy, self-justifying mind feels like watching a slow-motion car crash: you cannot look away even as she spirals deeper into theft, racism, and self-delusion. Kuang’s pacing is relentless, her satire of “performative diversity” and online outrage cut-throat, and the result is a book that reads like a Twitter storm you binge in one sitting and then keep thinking about for days

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Review: Yellowface

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hooter: Like watching a car wreck, directed by Wes Anderson.

Yellowface is a sharp, addictive publishing-world thriller that’s equal parts entertaining and uncomfortable. In a freak accident, a white washed out writer is around a highly accomplished Asian writer when she dies. She has an opportunity to take her top secret book script and pass it off as her own to revive her career. It becomes a roller coaster ride after that.

Slipping into June’s messy, self-justifying mind feels like watching a slow-motion car crash: you cannot look away even as she spirals deeper into theft, racism, and self-delusion. Kuang’s pacing is relentless, her satire of “performative diversity” and online outrage cut-throat, and the result is a book that reads like a Twitter storm you binge in one sitting and then keep thinking about for days

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Review: The Many That I Am: Writings from Nagaland

The Many That I Am: Writings from Nagaland by Anungla Zoe Longkumer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: "Mia ra vi pie thedze" (Ao Naga: There is no place like home)

Homecoming is a vibrant collation of Nagaland writing by women authors, filled with poems, songs, folk tales, and stories that capture the many layers of a land shaped by multiple tribes and narratives passed down over centuries.

There is deliberate curation around monumental events in the region’s shared history: the arrival and adoption of Christianity, the rebel movement that left civilians caught between two extremes, and the clash between Western education and traditional learning systems.

From imagining a world run by women to meditations on the art of forgiveness, the editor brings together non-stereotypical themes that resist easy categorisation. The piece that stayed with me most was the one where the protagonist struggles to adjust to changing times—Kohima’s urbanisation and concretisation, the natural landscape giving way to houses—until, as he puts it, he loses his nerve because “his sun had been stolen.” Having been in Kohima, I could visualise exactly what he meant, which made the story far more relatable.

The tattoo story, too, offers a striking and memorable take on the origins of design in a tribal lifestyle, grounding aesthetics in lived experience rather than abstraction. This collection is a rewarding entry point for anyone seeking literary, women-led windows into Nagaland’s past and present.

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Review: Verity

Verity by Colleen Hoover
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: Mildly messed‑up mind games

“Verity” is the kind of book that makes you double‑check your door locks, but not necessarily your worldview. It is a twisty psychological romantic thriller that leans hard on shock value, messy intimacy, and moral grey zones, but under all that noise, the core feels more like fast food than a slow, satisfying meal.

It felt like being trapped in a slightly trashy, very bingeable soap opera where everyone has a secret document and nobody has a therapist. The found‑manuscript device is deliciously creepy and the pages do fly, but once the dust (and body count) settles, the big moral ambiguity feels more like a clever party trick than a genuinely earned gut‑punch. Fun enough for a late‑night sprint, but TikTok’s “you will never recover” hype is wildly disproportionate to what is, at heart, a fast, messy thriller that you forget almost as quickly as you finished it.


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