2 out of 4 stars
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Churning is an anthology by Jayanti Datta comprised of ten different short stories ranging from realistic fiction to an almost mythical/fantasy aura of ancient traditional oral tales in India. Upon looking at the anthology, I expected a running concept or theme along with the short stories as I read it. Unfortunately, not only was it hard to find such a thing, that’s only one of the problems I’ve had with this anthology.
Reading through all the stories, I found some of the stories working with the idea from the blurb I had gotten but some not so much. I wasn’t so sure whether the author wanted the anthology to be more of a collection of stories they wrote or an anthology of short stories with a running theme but it seemed somewhat unbalanced.
That being said, one of the two major problems with Churning was its formatting. Table of contents appear before the title page (was there supposed to be a title page before?) and the written text was more-or-less a mess. Paragraphs of dialogue are formatted incorrectly, indented too far it becomes distracting from the stories.
Also on the point of dialogue, some of the character’s dialogues have dashes on them like listed information, which only distracts from the reading even further. It isn’t too many stories that avoid formatting errors (e.g. “The Forbidden Corner”) which keeps pulling me out from the stories themselves.
On a minor but still needs-to-be-addressed note, some misspelled and/or incorrectly formatted words are glaring and obvious, such as the word “think” instead of “thing” on page 113 in the “Kidney Transplant” story or “one” instead of “once” on page 105 in “Epic and Lyric.” Some awful errors don’t seem to make any rational sense like an asterisk on page 21. Like mentioned previously, all of these are distracting and should be fixed as they distract the reader from the written stories the author truly wanted them to enjoy.
Ten stories make up Churning. Among the most interesting (and engaging) stories throughout the entire collection would be “The Forbidden Corner,” “The Kidney Transplant,” and “The Silver Idol” – although the latter has a few faults but not too ghastly as the others. If the stories were more interesting, they probably would’ve made up for the typing blunders littered throughout. However, I found myself struggling through some stories such as “Only Connect” and “Epic and Lyric” because of my lack of interest but the story’s lack of interest in themselves. Stories can – and sometimes should – be leisurely paced, but nothing interesting was going around in weaker stories I mentioned. Had they been edited well or rewritten for better yarn to captivate the reader, the collection would’ve been made stronger.
With some positives on a handful of stories and, at the same time, with the terrible pitfalls this anthology suffered, I give Churning 2 out of 4 stars. A lot of faults and errors pushed this collection of stories into a great reading experience, although there are a few stories itching to be worth reading. I can’t give it more than a 2 for this, but for stories like “The Forbidden Corner,” “The Kidney Transplant,” and “The Silver Idol,” it doesn’t go as low as a 1. I expect that, with a little editing and cleaning up, Churning could be made into a much more powerful experience to readers with its deep concept and experiences.
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Churning
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