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chrysalis11's review
4.0
Interesting selection of stories from the Raj---a mix of the normal and the paranormal.
hsutherland2's review
4.0
This was an interesting, thought not exceptional, collection of short stories. The sentimentally-toned stories focus on the lives of the British civil servants and army personnel, and their wives, the necessary partners in the domestic dramas of the stories, who spent their careers in India. The 'natives' are simplistic, rarely developed characters. The second half, which has more ghost stories, was much more interesting to me than the love stories--the affairs, the almost affairs, the suspected-but-not-real affairs--which felt much too similar too each other. The most charming element of this collection was Ruskin Bond's foreword: how he finds the old volume in an untouched bookcase at a Himalaya hotel, how he steals the book so he can take it to the outside world; it was lovely. I was disappointed when I logged on to goodreads to find that another edition of this book was published in 2010! So much for a resurrected work of fiction. Still, I'd be interested in further reading of Alice Perrin's, as well as another reading choice curated by Ruskin Bond. Only gripe about this edition is that I read it after I lent it to a friend who read it, so it's been read twice, and the plastic coating is starting to separate from the paper cover on the edges.
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