Shiva and the rise of shadows by Kanika Dhillon

Mandar's book review (16th Feb 2014)

Completed reading "Shiva and the rise of shadows" by Kanika Dhillon. This is a young adult fiction.

It is 2019. Suddenly mushroom clouds appear killing the plants, animals and humans. Bangalore (then capital of India), Chennai and Hyderabad are wiped out entirely. Shiva, whose parents died in a lightning strike, is hiding  in Dharavi with his elder brother, Shakti, and younger cousin, Vasuki. Suddenly Shakti goes missing. Spiders decide to inhibit Vasuki's body and Shiva loses his consciousness.

Shiva wakes up in a school full of weird students. Students in west wing, where Shiva is located, are students with special abilities like ability to disappear, turning into an animal or bird, smelling emotions, telekinesis etc.

Shadow is rising and humanity is up for the final battle with dark forces. Suddenly creatures that were supposed to be extinct start surfacing. Shiva had heard bed time stories from his father regarding such creatures.

Was his father giving him a message? What are Shiva's special abilities? Will the other children at school accept him or target him? Who was his father in this equation? What is the final battle? Is there a traitor? There is a girl  who had survived atom bomb blast. Shadows and keepers want her. What's so special?

This book seems to be influenced by Harry Potter (school, teachers, magic etc.) and X-men (Special abilities, controlling them etc.)
Author has done a good job of Indianizing the story by giving Indian context and by making use of Indian mythology and characteristics of mythological Shiva. Kanika has shown good imagination while assigning powers to the characters.

By the time Shiva knows his special ability almost half of the book is over. The canvas of the story is huge. A lot of creatures, magical animals, men with special abilities, villains were to be created. This requires a lot of page space in order to introduce such characters, create a story, make it interesting and take it to conclusion with tantalizing climax. This book is  about 230 pages long and  author has clearly fallen short of page space. This has resulted in running through events without proper justification, not letting the story bloom and missing details thereby creating loop holes. That's why climax also turns out to be somewhat anti climax. We can expect more from Kanika in future.

The book ends with a battle won. But the war is not over. Kanika definitely wants to create a series out of this.

An OK read for teenagers.