Book Review : Karna's Celestial Armor - Surendra Nath

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If I ever had to chose between reading about the stories of Ramayana and Mahabharata, I would always prefer to select the latter as Mahabharata had characters of various shades and hence, the story from the perspective of different characters brings out different shades of the entire story. I still remember "The Palace of Illusions" which was reenactment of Mahabharata with Draupadi as the central character. Karna, the illegitimate son of Kunti was one of my favourite character and reading his story was something I looked forward to.

Coming to the book, Karna's Celestial Armor is not a book based on Mahabharata but is a current day plot of an Army man named Vasu who was on a mission to find Karna's Kavach - Kundalam. His adventures while searching for the same is quite aptly described in the book. Vasu travels from Himalayas to Rameshwaram in search of the Celestial Armor. The story is filled with betrayal, suspense, kidnapping, car chases above all others.

What's good about the book is the story is written in quite a simple manner so as to engage the readers easily with the book. The supernatural elements of the book are so well imbibed in the story that one does not feel that the characters are superficial. The plot is quite different and does not take the support of any existing conspiracy theories that Ashwin Sanghi is known for.

The book unfortunately falls flat in lot of places that could have been avoided. The proof reading was poor and the editor/s should have taken utter care of it as it was the author's third book. The character's sketch were not deep and hence one could not connect with the characters at any point eventhough the story is quite gripping. A major character was never named throughout the story and this was another downside of the book. The story started dragging in the last 50 pages but this can be overlooked when the overall concept is taken into consideration.

My suggestion would be that you should read the book to encourage the author and the author should take care of avoiding the various shortcomings that this book had.

My Rating - ⭐⭐⭐ out of 5

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