The Palace of Illusion by Chitra Banerjee Divakumari presents a woman’s take on the great epic Mahabharata. The novel as an introduction to the Mahabharata is quite appreciable but both its feminist and imaginative desires seem superficial. Divakaruni’s reinterpretation of the Mahabharata falters above all because of an absence of imagination. The grief of the original story and its powerful heroine as untreated image, combined with her gift for permeating beauty in even the most tedious storylines, should have made this book the author’s masterpiece. However, this book lacks in many aspects and could not actually impress me as a reader.
