Book Review by #LITEROMA :: "Frosted Glass" by Sabarna Roy

** Thanks to the author for gifting us an ecopy of the book for review. **

** Thanks to our reviewer for reviewing the book on behalf of Literoma. **

Title: Frosted Glass
Author: Sabarna Roy
Publisher: Frog Books
Language: English
Pages: 350
Genre: Story and Poems
One line review: An ahead of time book

"Frosted Glass" comprises of one story cycle consisting of 14 stories and one poem cycle consisting of 21 poems. It is the third book written by Sabarna Roy which I got a chance to read. The promise which I could figure out in the earlier two books had now got turned into a full fledged work of class. Yes! The author Sabarna Roy stamps his true class with the book 'Frosted Glass'. There is hardly any book similar to Frosted Glass had been written in the recent times in Indian literature.

Some of my personal favourites from the story cycle are - Midnight Conversation, A Meeting in a Cafe, The Last Plunge and Instantaneous Death. All these stories have some connection to my personal life and that might be the extra reason of liking. But that does not mean I disliked the rest, but somehow these created a deeper impact on me.

Poems too are not to be overlooked because personally I believe it is a more difficult form of literature as all thoughts and expressions need to be restricted to limited number of words and metres. To quote Roy from the poem titled 'Ladder to the Moon':-

"Come what may, time will pass!
The days will fall into nights; the nights will slip down the abyss of forgotten
weeks and the weeks into tedious months. The months
will then seamlessly
form prickly years and the years will flow into
ceremonial columns of
decades in ravaged layers."

The book clearly conveys how good a human character observer Mr. Roy is. Any passing reader is going to like the creation irrespective of age as the poems and stories presented in the book touch the lives and stages of people of different strata belonging to different age groups. However, a mix of stories and poems in same title do not gel very well for selective readers like us, majority of whom have a liking towards either prose or verse, depending on mood and personal choice of literary art forms. It is recommended not to mix these two parallel genres in future titles.

My verdict of "Frosted Glass" will be 3.6*/5*.

All the Literoma reviews are available at our page:-
https://literomagroup.blogspot.com/

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