I just completed re-reading Eric Van Lustbader’s “Shiro Ninja”. I have read the entire Nicholas Linnear series -Ninja, The Miko, Kaisho, and Floating City. When we cleared our shelves of all the fiction books, and gave away nearly a 100 titles to our condominium library in Gurgaon, all of Eric Van Lustbader’s books went there. Suddenly I felt like reading about Nicholas Linnear since I enjoy all books related to the martial arts.
The Shiro Ninja is a fantastic book to understand Japanese mysticism and magic entwined with the martial arts. It’s also about how evil sometimes can become so powerful as to render the good powerless. Nicholas Linnear loses all his Ninja capability and becomes a Shiro Ninja – powerless. His struggle to get back his powers, discovery of his lineage and finally the way he defeats the dorokusai (evil Ninja, simply put) is fascinatingly woven into a great novel. Do read the book if you enjoy a good story about the martial arts and set in Japan. There is a statement in the book where Shisei, the twin sister of the evil Ninja, says to a US police officer that the western understanding of the martial arts is that it is about physical strength and prowess whereas the true martial arts is more mental than physical. So true … Yoga or Taichi for instance is not just exercise, it’s almost a meditation.
Enjoyed re-reading Shiro Ninja !
I read this Nora Roberts novel called “Whiskey Beach” in Mongolia, when we were there in September 2015. I bought it accidentally on the Kindle app, while buying some other book. I have read a couple of Nora Roberts’ books and they dealt with witches. So I thought this one also will be about witchcraft but it turned out to be a TV soap type teenage romantic novel. Rich boy falls for a housekeeper who is a yoga teacher and much later confesses to being the daughter of a Nobel laureate… Both boy and girl have bad first marriages and there is some shipwreck fortune hunter who is the villain. It’s a frothy, feel good type novel – so don’t waste money if you like a good story. This is too predictable and I don’t understand the western fiction writer’s obsession with sex and depicting the bedroom scene vividly … Anyway, Whiskey Beach is an expensive version of Mills and Boons – definitely NOT recommended.