Book Review: Quarantine

Book Review: Quarantine

No matter how beautiful words you might come across about this book in review pages, this is a simple straightforward review from gay living in India for gays living in India!

Being an Indian Gay, reading Quarantine was different experience for me. Where the inner saga of acceptance, identity & coming out to parents ends from there stories of Quarantine begins.

This is the book which would keep glued those homosexual men who are eager to explore further shades of gay life or have already experienced them. Far ahead than crushes, love, heart brakes & lust, Rahul Mehta’s book gives you the narration of events that happens in matured gay phase of life. These are stories of Gay & Non Gay things happening around gay men.

The first thing I would appreciate about this book is its fabulous Pink cover which softens the mood & makes it handier. 9 stories are of 9 second generation Indian origin gay men living in USA. Many of them are having partners few of them are single. More or less considerable presence of family characters in stories gives more Indian-ness to the plot. Although it is first book of author, narration is quite good but characters do not get more familiar while reading due to less expressive presentation of characters. At one point of time you will feel that all stories have happened to a single guy in different college years.

Last 3 stories are holding almost half of the pages of book. Author does have successfully presented few issues which Indian readers would feel some attachment with but as I said above unclear expression of characters & limited narration on few events will not make you hold or emphasize with story nor character.

This is a perfect book for gay men in 30s when they have done with career, relations, understood all complexities of gay life & have enough time to talk to people like them. I am not saying all characters in book are in 30s but Indian readers of 20s would find it too mature.

For the points I shall give 2/5.