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The cover of Shreyas Rajagopal’s second novel Gunboy <\/p>\nRight from the word go, Gunboy fires off from all cylinders. It\u2019s a bullet-laced bildungsroman tangled in a gun-slinging revenge drama. It\u2019s a tale that knows exactly what it wants to be. It\u2019s fast, familiar, and never pretends otherwise.<\/p>\n
The cover of Shreyas Rajagopal’s second novel Gunboy <\/p>\n
Set in Maharashtra\u2019s Rannwara, we meet Arvind and Sudipto, two schoolboys \u2014 one scraping by, one rich \u2014 both bruised by the same schoolyard tyrant, Jaggi. Their days are stitched together with fear, until the infamous hitman Amar Singh drifts into town with a stash of guns and the swagger of a Hindi crime classic. And that\u2019s when they meet Gun. Not a gun. The Gun \u2014 gleaming white, gold-dipped, and blessed by Lord Hanuman himself.<\/p>\n
Until this point, the novel gives you a tender, observant peek into the kind of childhood pain that adults dismiss, but for the children never really disappears. But then, the tempo shifts and the prose tightens. The story steps into the now-familiar visual territory of a streaming thriller. You might imagine the alternating POVs of Manoj Bajpayee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui of Gangs of Wasseypur playing these characters. It could be a coincidence, or maybe it\u2019s the echo chamber of every OTT screen we\u2019ve been glued to for the last five years. But let\u2019s be clear: just because it feels familiar doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s forgettable.<\/p>\n
Author Shreyas Rajagopal, in his second fictional outing, knows how to build style. The action is crisp and the pace is addictive. There\u2019s a mythology-tinted mystery around the Gun that keeps the intrigue burning. This willingness to blend myth, memory, and machismo in the same breath is what makes it interesting. The Gun itself is treated less as a weapon and more as a relic, complete with the ethereal calibre of a talisman that has been blessed by the gods.<\/p>\n
This straddling of pulp stylisation and spiritual symbolism injects a surreal charge into an otherwise grounded tale. That is a gamble, since those expecting gritty realism may find the mystical charge going against this world of Maharashtra\u2019s street politics. But it does deepen the novel\u2019s folklore quality. By daring to place divine iconography in the crosshairs of a crime saga, this is not just about boys and bullets, but also about the myths we build as a people to survive violence of all natures.<\/p>\n
But where the book falters is in its (unsurprising) lack of female voices. There is only one female voice and POV \u2014 Srilekha \u2014 and she is barely given the space that she deserves, especially in a story this testosterone-heavy.<\/p>\n
Still, Gunboy doesn\u2019t try to be revolutionary. It wants to entertain and makes no promises it doesn\u2019t keep. You can flip through this read in a single sitting, be it on a flight, in bed, or during a lazy monsoon afternoon. Pick up a copy not to chase the new, but to enjoy the familiar done with flair. A good cliche is still a good story.<\/p>\n
Title: Gunboy<\/p>\n
Author: Shreyas Rajagopal<\/p>\n
Publisher: HarperCollins India<\/p>\n
Price: \u20b9499<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Right from the word go, Gunboy fires off from all cylinders. It\u2019s a bullet-laced bildungsroman tangled in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[62254,62257,223,88,62253,56161,62256,62255],"class_list":{"0":"post-91234","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-bildungsroman","9":"tag-book-review-website","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-gunboy","13":"tag-maharashtra","14":"tag-myth-and-memory","15":"tag-revenge-drama"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}