Michael McEvoy's Reviews > The Mountain Shadow

Maybe I remember Shantaram through rose-coloured glasses, but I have a vivid sense of loving it so much. The writing was exquisite; it felt like I was in India, and could smell the slums and feel the heartache of everyone's struggles.

The Mountain Shadow seems like it's written by a completely different person. The vivid detail is lost, replaced instead by abstract metaphors that make the author come across as arrogant and full of himself. The storyline did not interest me at all. It largely focussed on the war between two rival gangs. Shantaram's love, Karla, returned, and he described her eyes as "Queens" on a chessboard. This was the most overused description in the book. I kid you not, if you have the ebook and do a search for "queens", it would return over 100 matches. Every time she looked at someone, she "flashed them her queens".

He also felt it necessary to split the book into 15 parts. There was nothing distinctly different about each part so this division was unnecessary. And who writes a book that goes up to Part 15 anyway?! I'd give it a miss.