A real disappointment
"Aru Shah and the End of Time" is the first novel of the Pandava Quintet series by Roshani Chokshi. It's also among the first of the much hyped "Rick Riordan Presents" line of books launched in 2018, which was inspired by the success of the popular "Percy Jackson & the Olympians" series by Rick Riordan, and which have mythology of various cultures and countries driving the plot.
In this case we find ourselves immersed into Hindu mythology, along with the protagonist 12-year-old Aru Shah. From the outset I found Aru hard to like, especially because she tells many lies to her friends in an effort to be popular and fit in. I don't mind a flawed character, but this was too much, and made it difficult to identify with her. Then it turns out that Aru is a demi-god who is daughter of a god from the Hindu pantheon, and she is half-divine. This kind of thing will sound very familiar to fans of Rick Riordan's books. I didn't care for Riordan's Percy Jackson series, so it probably won't be a surprise that I didn't like this book either.
But there's a bigger problem with Chokshi's book: it's not retelling the mythology of pagan ancients, but retelling the story of a current religion that is actively believed by millions of worshipers around the world today. Those who happen to consider this religion more a matter of fiction than reality – myself included – won't have too much trouble considering this being classified as "fantasy". But at the same time this is rather problematic. The gods in this series are presented as very human, and the tone trivializes everything about divinity and religion. So it's hard to take anything seriously, when for some people the Hindu religion is very serious. The cheesy trivialization and tone makes it seem more like a parody than a respectful retelling, and is somewhat surprising considering that the author is a practicing Hindu herself.
Besides that issue, I just found myself uninterested in the story line, and didn't find it very engaging. The author also tries too hard to make the novel relevant to a modern audience. It seems to me that all the references to today's pop culture will quickly make it feel dated, and this book really won't translate well to audiences reading this ten to twenty years from now.
I gave up about halfway, and just read a plot synopsis to see if I should be convinced to reconsider reading all the way to the end. There was nothing that made it seem remotely interesting enough to spend more time on it, so this ends up being a rare DNF.
by EndersGame_Reviewer
1 Comment
Is that even surprising? Every single modern fictional series based on Greek mythology adopts only the stories, and presents them as mere tales by separating them from their historical, cultural, and religious contexts. Percy Jackson, God of War, Clash of the Titans, etc. get away with what they do only because modern European and American audiences live in a Christianity-dominant society and know little of how polytheist belief systems work. Doing the same to Hindu mythology ain’t gonna work — Americans and Europeans don’t care about the stories, and Hindus won’t care for the decontextualisation.
I just saw the plot of this book on Wikipedia and it’s like the author just mixed a dozen tropes that one finds in Hindu Purāṇic stories in a blender and created a Frankenstein-like monstrosity. One can just read the Mahābharata itself for a much grander and more mature epic.