Review: She: Ekla Cholo Re

She: Ekla Cholo Re by Santosh Avvannavar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

‘She: Ekla Cholo Re’ is the story of Kusum, a transgender.

I’ll start by saying I cannot claim to be an expert in these sorts of books, and I never really know how to rate them. True stories are one thing, but fictional stories are something else entirely. As I’m not transgender, I never know whether or not the author has done a good job or not. It feels wrong to say one way or the other when I do not have any personal experience.

Despite this, I did enjoy the book.

It’s a mere handful of pages, short and sweet, allowing you to finish it in no time at all. It doesn’t take much by way of effort, allowing you to read it in those periods where you just need something to fill the time. The story is straight to the point, pulling you in and giving you all you would expect.

I will say, however, that the story telling wasn’t what I had hoped it would be. This is one of the stories where the story is told through someone telling the story to another. I know that’s a complicated way of explaining it, but such is how my brain labels it. Rather than reading the events, we list to the character tell another how things happened. Personally, I’m not a big lover of this way of storytelling. It means the story is mostly dialogue – and whilst I love good dialogue, I also love watching events unfold. I like the little details, I like the way everything comes together, and with this one we simply listen to a character telling us how something played out.

It was fun, but I had wanted a bit more in terms of the way the story unfolded.

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