Title: Life of a Sunset Kid
Author: Udayakumar DS
Publisher: Leadstart
Genre: Fantasy
First Publication: 2022
Language: English
Book Summary: Life of a Sunset Kid by Udayakumar DS
Pratiksha, a young girl gets hold of a neglected journal – Kris, that belonged to her late uncle Shyam, two decades after his demise. Her curiosity about Shyam grows as she eagerly dives into Kris.
Shyam had battled a degenerative muscle disease through his short life of fourteen years. To liberate his parents from the insurmountable pain and suffering they endured from his condition, he relentlessly pushed his brain’s limits to achieve greatness in several ways. Kris unveils the learnings received and the people encountered by the physically constrained, wheelchair-bound Shyam on the journeys he made into the other realms usually not accessible to humans.
Pratiksha shocks her family when she reveals something she read in Kris – an incident that Shyam could not have known about because it happened years after his death. How did the past unfold into the unseen future? What had Shyam unraveled about the human journey, especially his own journey?
Book Review: Life of a Sunset Kid by Udayakumar DS
Life of a Sunset Kid is a coming of age tale of a young boy who dares to look at life with great optimism and sense of wonder despite the fact that he was living the unfortunate circumstance as he battled a degenerative muscle disease through his short life of fourteen years. His zest for life, his creative spirit, and his enthusiasm are unaffected by the tremendous agony and misery he endures. His experience is written down in a diary called Kris, but it reveals much more than what can be contained in a journal. We are privileged to read his journal entries through Pratiksha, who discovers her uncle Shyam’s abandoned journal two decades after he passed away.
Kris, Shyam’s journal, reveals the knowledge gained and the individuals met by the wheelchair-bound Shyam on his excursions to other worlds often inaccessible to humankind. It adds another layer of mystery to the intriguing journal when Pratiksha reveals an incident recorded in Kris that occurred long after Shyam’s death. This intricate and multi-faceted tale is brilliantly structured and meticulously textured, yet the author manages to write it with the lightest of touches and guiding hands, as if he knows precisely where he is taking his readers on their journey!
This book is premised on the notion that the main character, Shyam, who is disabled and confined to a wheelchair, keeps a journal in which he records the knowledge he acquires and the people he meets. Pratiksha unearthed this journal twenty years after his demise. The chronological entries from the journal make up the majority of the book, which I devoured completely with a voracious appetite. Reading Shyam’s profound musings was a really intimate and emotionally evocative experience for me.
This is a fascinating narrative with vivid details that allows you to lose yourself in it and gives you a genuine feeling of being transported to another time and place. Udayakumar is an author who is undoubtedly also a skilled storyteller, whose fluency with words and descriptive style of writing add a unique depth and range to his work and keep the changes in the dual timelines clean and seamless. At the same time, he has an assured ease and confidence in his writing style and narrative, which make the reading experience profoundly touching, visually descriptive, and capture the emotion of the moments wonderfully.
The author has created an engaging, multi-faceted cast of characters from both time zones who are completely relatable, well defined, and well developed, and in whom readers can totally invest. They have been afforded a strong voice to tell their own story, which they do with some genuinely believable dialogue and in an addictive style, keeping true to the time. Shyam has not been afraid to expose his individual emotional complexities and vulnerabilities and his divergent family dynamics, which are dealt with sympathetically and with some excellent interpersonal interactions.
