Unlocked: Historical Tales in Verse by Sonia Dogra

Unlocked: Historical Tales in Verse is a collection of tales of history presented in the form of poetry by Sonia Dogra.

About the Author

Sonia has been a teacher and reporter before working as a freelance proofreader. She understands the business well and it reflects in her writing. Unlocked: Historical Tales in Verse is her third published book of poetries.

Title

The title is apt for the book. It clearly tells what the book is all about.

Cover

The cover is of professional quality. If you can manage to identify the persons in the cover, then you’ll get a hint of those who are going to be discussed in the book.

Contents

The book has diversified content. On one hand, it talks about a slave from Africa who founded Aurangabad and built the famous system of Neher. On the other, it talks about a president who lived with a bullet in his chest.

It also speaks about a person about whom it could be said that he prevented the third world war to happen during the cold war. There’s also a mention about earlier quarantines.

The book also raises interesting questions like could the holocaust be prevented if Hitler took therapy from Freud? Or, could the Titanic be saved from sinking if David Blaire was not replaced with Henry Wilde?

It has stories of nose, beard, football, monopoly game all with historical significance.

The total poetries in the book is 24. It has around 18000 words that can be finished in an hour & a half.

Narration

The stories are told in the form of poetry. The style is free verse. The language is very clear, simple, and easy to understand. The poetess takes extra care by providing footnotes for historical terms & figures to make reading a pleasant experience.

Structure and Design

The book is well structured. The verses are put into two categories: ‘The famous and the infamous,’ and ‘epoch making episodes’ with a prologue and an epilogue.

‘The famous and infamous’ directly deals with the personal anecdotes while ‘epoch making episodes’ deals with tales that had a wide-ranging effect on society, or in other words, shaped the history in some way.

The design is offset-ready or at least printer-ready. The pagination is also done following the norms of print-edition. You can take printouts of it on A4 and bind it to get a feel of a traditional book.

The reading experience is also good on mobile devices though all pages are not reflowable. The font-size is big enough to be visible on a continuous page or page by page mode.  

Concluding Remarks

The book excels in every department whether it’s content or presentation.

If you wanna astonish or show off by telling a relatively unknown yet a significant historical tale, this is the book for you. It’s available free for a limited time. You can download it from Blogchatter.  

Note: This is a review of the book for potential readers. It isn’t proper feedback for an author. The scope of manuscript analysis is very vast. Here’s a sample of detailed feedback written keeping in mind the author’s interest.