Age of Vice

✮✮✮✮

Feb 2

Age of Vice - Deepti Kapoor

my review : ✮✮✮✮

Buzz Buzz Buzz
…do you hear that?!
 That’s all the buzz around this book! Oh my god, everywhere I look, someone is talking about The Age of Vice. This book is the belle of the freaking ball right now. FX won the bidding war to get the rights to make this a limited series, and the book is being touted as “India’s answer to The Godfather.”

I will keep my review brief because THIS BOOK WAS NYAB (not your average beach read). It’s incredibly dark and deals with disturbing subject matter that is very tough to stomach. Despite all of that, I found the book to be incredibly hard to put down, with the writing pulling me in from the beginning.

I think I am in the minority in that I like the book, but I don’t think it would make my top 5 list. I was soo unsatisfied with the ending, but upon learning 2 more books are slated to come out, and this is a trilogy, the untied ends make way more sense.

The author told Vogue that she likes stories that “create empathy rather than solutions.” She does an excellent job of getting me to empathize with various characters in the book (oh my god!! my heart was broken for like 90% of this book), but I was looking for some resolution.

The story starts with a car crash, 5 people dead, and the driver is an inebriated servant of a very wealthy man. The servant cannot answer what led to the crash, and our story begins weaving a dark web of deception, greed, and murder that all lead back to the wealthy and powerful Wadia family.

The book is told from various POVs, which I really loved, and I found the storytelling incredibly unique.

Moral of the story: Excellent writing, fascinating subject matter, but I feel @elleryadams said it best on Goodreads: “I needed a scrap of hope to balance out the grimness.” …I think that’s what this story was missing for me—a shred of hope in this dark world Kapoor created.