Draupadi

As soon as I saw this book on an Indian booktuber's tbr for the month, I knew I had to get it immediately. However, I found the ebook to be a bit pricey but did have a lot of credits left, so decided to pick up the audiobook, which was maybe not the right choice.

As a self proclaimed huge fan of the Mahabharata, I'm always up for a new interpretation or POV, and the ones told through the lens of the female protagonists always feel special. So I was naturally very excited to read this book which is Draupadi's story. And the story itself was well told, giving us a deeper glimpse into the kind of person she is, her strengths and weaknesses, and her relationships with all the Pandavas as well as Krishna. There are some interesting discussions about war, morality and doing the right thing but they did feel like more modern interpretations of the original epic. And I loved that the author doesn't hesitate from using a lot of common Indian language words, but I particularly enjoyed that the pronunciation of all the names is in a South Indian style and how I grew up with.

However, that isn't enough to make this a very good book. The general vocabulary in the story is very modern, which though didn't bother me much, might feel anachronistic to other readers and I won't deny that it did feel like a contemporary sometimes. The book is pretty short, so it leads to many time skips and I felt that this makes the story discontinuous and not very coherent at times, which also result in some very abrupt chapter changes. And unfortunately, I found many sentences repeat at multiple instances and I have a feeling it's due to editing issues of the audiobook production, and not an issue with the book itself.

In the end, this book is a decent addition to my Mahabharata collection and it is always empowering to read these epics from a female perspective, but it turned out not to be as amazing as I expected. But maybe that's just a me problem because I always expect too much when it relates to this particular source material. I think you can give this a try, but it is not for novices and definitely needs basic prior knowledge of the Mahabharata so that you don't feel lost.