Wednesday, November 12, 2014

A Perfect Thriller - ‘God is a Gamer’ by Ravi Subramaniam

Book Review of ‘God is a Gamer’
Publisher – Penguin Books
Genre – Thriller/Fiction

One sentence for the book
Twists and turns throughout the story keep you engrossed enough, but the detective within the reader may not be successful to nail the culprit in this thriller till the last few pages.

About the Author


A career banker and financial services professional, Ravi has worked with various multinational banks (Citibank, ANZ Grindlays Bank and HSBC) for over eighteen years. As a result of his extensive background in foreign banks, writing about banking comes quite naturally to Ravi.  His earlier works, If God was a Banker, The Bankster, Bankerupt are all set against the backdrop of the financial services industry.

Author’s Writing Style
Described as the ‘John Grisham of banking’, by the Wall Street Journal, Ravi has an engrossing style of writing. Being a banker himself, Ravi is not aloof from what all happens inside the financial sector, still a positive of his writings is the way he explains the tiniest details of something technical for not-so technical reader. In a recent book launch event in Delhi, Ravi interestingly unfolded his success mantra, “Put a murder in the first few pages and introduce twists in the tale at the end.”

The Title and Book Cover


I have been away from the world of books since quite a long time now, but then came an opportunity to review the book from BlogAdda.com.  The title ‘God is a Gamer’ was enough to excite the reader within me and I thought to give it a try.

The title indeed is catchy and interesting. It forces the reader to think at least once that how God has gamed with them. The book perfectly displays how the destiny can change your lives in a blink, a lesson to be remembered by all of us.

Book cover has been interestingly designed. A bitcoin image on the cover surely gets the reader interested to know more about what it is actually. The sub-title ‘Is Revenge a Crime?’ is another clincher for the reader to already go into the spreads of imagination of the revenge stories.

About the Book
A small book of 300+ pages conveniently divided into nearly 100 chapters, it helps the author portray different characters and emotions at different locations and connecting the dots seems an effortless task for the reader. Still, the reader does not lose the hold on the story at any place neither does the author gives the suspense easily. The suspense remains ‘a suspense’ till the very last pages. The narration has all been done in third person. Still, one feels as if all the scenes are happening at that very moment. The narratives have been given a personal touch. I enjoyed going through the different scenes in the story, few quite enjoyable, few little avoidable, but the story has its own pace which grips the reader within you.

The book has been widely promoted as a first-ever Bitcoin thriller. Bitcoins, a virtual currency, has been a mystery for a greater part of the world and this book tries to capture this unexplored arena. It has added to the surprise element of the story and also gave enough room for creative imagination to the author.

Thumbs Up

The climax is surely the greatest strength for this game of The God since Ravi connects the dots spread all around the story in an unexpected end to the chain of events. On what unfolds in the end is surely something surprising, at least for me, it was. Given that I am not an avid reader and still getting me finish up a book in a single day calls for another applause for the author.

What could have been better
The plot of the story is so vast that the author has left going much into detailing part for a couple of his characters. The emotional connect between the characters and reader is missing and the reader will hardly care what happened to the characters post the climax.

However, given that the book is a thriller, it is reasonably fine to get the story part demystified and don’t care about the characters in the end.

Rating

Ravi has surely impressed me with his style. I will rate this one a 4.5/5 and I would love to read his other books as well.

This review is a part of the biggest Book Review Program for Indian Bloggers. Participate now to get free books.

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