Saturday, April 8, 2023

Review: Five Fortunes by Barbara Venkataraman


Genre: YA

Description:

“When five fourteen-year-old girls get their fortunes from an arcade machine just for kicks, it turns their world upside-down and their close-knit group of friends starts to fall apart.

Misunderstandings abound as allegiances shift and outsiders start to come between them. The fortunes seem to be self-fulfilling prophecies - whether the girls believe in them or not.

Do our beliefs color our perception of the world? Do we ever see ourselves the way others see us, and why is change so hard?

Budding romance, angry bees, teenage fashion influencers, and parents who just don't get it make Barbara Venkataraman's Five Fortunes a fun story you won't soon forget.”

Author:

An attorney and mediator specializing in family law, Barbara Venkataraman is also an author with a variety of different books. She’s written a series of mysteries, a few collections of short stories. She’s written non-fiction as well, with a fun book about grammar and even co-wrote a memoir with her son about his experience as a activist who helped exonerate four men falsely accused of rape in Florida in the 1940s.

For more, check out Ms Venkataraman’s blog.

Appraisal:

The description for this book tells the story well. My extremely abbreviated version, “five friends each get fortunes from an arcade machine and it shakes up their friendships and their lives” tells you the setup. The repercussions of this and how each of the five works through it is a fun, entertaining, and thought-provoking tale. While aimed at young adults and in my estimation the ideal reader would probably be a high school female, I can see this being enjoyed by readers of any age or gender. I enjoyed it and I’m an elderly adult (well, at least far from young).

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues.

Rating: **** Four Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 15-20,000 words

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