which won the White Pine Award and the Bapsi Sidhwa Literary Prize, and The Beauty of the Moment, which won the Nautilus Gold Award for Young Adult Fiction. Her acclaimed debut, A Girl Like That, was named a Best Book of the Year by numerous outlets including The Globe and Mail, Seventeen, and The Times of India. Her debut adult fantasy, Witch Daughter, will be published in fall 2026 by Grand Central.
At Lit Hub Bhathena tagged nine feminist myth and fairytale retellings to read after watching Christopher Nolan’s big screen adaptation of The Odyssey. One title on the list:
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of IllusionsRead about the other entries on the list.
When it comes to retellings of Indian mythology, nothing for me has quite compared to this novel by Divakaruni. Set during the time of the great epic, the Mahabharata, the book focuses on Panchali (or Draupadi), a princess who marries five brothers, each embodying one of the five qualities she was looking for in a husband. Panchali is not without her flaws and rejects a worthy suitor simply because of the caste he was born into. That Divakaruni is able to make her protagonist sympathetic and showcase all her shades of gray talks to her remarkable skill as a writer.
The Palace of Illusions is among Zen Cho's six SFF books about gods and pantheons.
--Marshal Zeringue
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