Book Reviews of Folded Away Softly that Stole my Heart
Here is a book review of Folded Away Softly by a long-time friend, Prof Belinda Lopez:
Folded Away Softly is a beautiful and thoughtful collection of poems that gently unfolds layers of memory, emotion, and lived experience, much like the careful opening of something long and tenderly preserved.
The opening pages set a quietly arresting tone.
As I began reading, I felt I was entering a world of intimate exchanges, personal letters written across time. This drew me deeper into the collection. It was only as I continued that I realised these were poems, each one capturing a distinct moment, feeling, or fragment of human experience.
Several poems, Powerless, To the Top, and Street Urchins, felt especially close to home, resonating with conversations and experiences the author has shared over the years. This familiarity gave the book a deeply personal quality.
One of the most striking aspects of this collection is its honest embrace of emotional complexity. Betrayal lays bare raw feeling, while Child and The Drift hold the quiet contradictions that love and relationship bring: vulnerability alongside strength, closeness threaded through with distance.
These poems do not resolve their tensions so much as hold them with grace.
Appreciation brings a gentle tenderness to the collection, a pause of warmth amid its more searching passages. Then there is Faith, a poem that stopped me entirely.
Encountered towards the latter part of the book, it carries the weight of a history both distant and deeply present, evoking experiences of suffering, endurance, and identity that transcend the personal and touch something far wider. Its placement near the close of the collection feels deliberate, guiding the reader toward its broader meaning after everything that came before.
What makes Folded Away Softly remarkable is not only its emotional honesty, but the quiet courage it takes to give such experiences poetic form, making them available across difference, across history, across faith.
This is a collection that invites the reader to slow down, sit with what is difficult alongside what is tender, and find a shared humanity in both.
It is a book that stays with you beyond the final page.
Prof Belinda Lopez
Here is another book review from Dhananjay Gulwady, a fellow mentor from the Samarth Bhanap Yojana, an initiative to support young entrepreneurs.
Having attended the book launch of ‘Folded Away Softly’, we picked up the book and started reading it on the Uber ride back home. The short length of the poems, with a prose context for each, made them an interesting read. I read a few poems and kept the book aside. Back home, I read some more and finished most of the poems the next day. My wife, who had accompanied me to the launch, did the same.
We kept the book in our living room and found that we picked it up now and then to read a few random pages again over the next week or so.
The fact that you can go through the book at random makes Mangal’s book so absorbing. I have seldom read poetry, and each poem dwells on either a day-to-day situation or a particular time in her past or personal experience, and is portrayed so well that we can easily relate to it.
In the poem titled The Mango Tree, she recounts how, as a little girl living in Mulki, a small town near Mangalore, she planted a mango seed in her house, which has grown into a beautiful tree, while she now lives in a city full of noise and strangers. I liked this a lot, as I had planted a flowering tree in a rented house I lived in thirty years ago, which grew well while I lived there, and I wondered how the tree fares today.
In “Street Urchins,” it is just a fleeting thought that she dwells upon and composes a poem on urchins giving a few coins to a lady beggar.
Faith is philosophical and makes you ponder religious beliefs and the bigotry we see nowadays. In the first poem, eponymously titled after her book, she writes about how letters received by post in the past were folded back into the envelopes they came in after being read. They evoke old memories so well.
All her poems have an illustration and a textual explanation, and the book is definitely an interesting and delightful read. I have known Mangal as an entrepreneur and someone who devotes time to social causes, and now as an author and writer of children’s books and poetry. Do go ahead and pick a copy, and you won’t be disappointed!
Dhananjay Gulwadi
The reason why an author requests for their book reviews is not just for a feel good, but it also helps other readers if it is exactly the kind of book they want to purchase. So, it is a tool that provides an insight into the book the reviewer has read.
Some readers have left their reviews on Goodreads, a platform that showcases Authors and Books that help the community to pick the kind of books they want to read. Here is a link to my books on Goodreads:
View my books on Goodreads
More Reviews from Goodreads and Amazon
This book felt more like real thoughts written on paper than just poems. Many poems gave me a small “yeah, that’s true” feeling and made me think in a different way.
What I liked most is that you don’t have to read it fully in one sitting. You can open any random page, read one poem, and still feel connected to it. Some poems are simple, some are deep, and many feel very real and relatable.
It is a calm and comforting book to read when you just want to slow down for a while. Still, “The Lady in Red” poem and its placement in the book were honestly quite shocking in a good way.
Sasi Ram Kanna, on Goodreads
Folded Away Softly felt less like reading a book and more like sitting quietly with someone who understands the weight of unspoken emotions.
Mangal D. Karnad writes with such tenderness that every page feels personal, like memories, pain, healing, and identity were carefully unfolded and placed before the reader.
The words are soft, yet they leave a deep imprint. It’s the kind of collection that doesn’t demand attention loudly but slowly finds its place in your heart. A beautifully intimate read for anyone who has ever felt deeply and carried their story in silence.
Below are the book reviews for Folded Away Softly from amazon:
Viaanraj, on Amazon
Nice collection of poems. A reflection of both personal and professional life experiences. Simple to read and relate to. An enjoyable read. Some of my favourite poems: Folded Away Softly, Success, Obsession, Childhood, Stillness, Not a Feminist, Listen.
Arvind Padmanabhan, published author, Amazon
Very well written book in simple words from the heart – each poem is on the basis of childhood and life experiences of the author. It takes you to another carefree time.
Ms Neena, on Amazon
Which Poem Will Stay With You?
Folded Away Softly clearly lands differently depending on who’s reading it. For Prof. Belinda Lopez, it reads like something intimate and confessional; for Dhananjay Gulwadi, it’s the kind of book you keep returning to at random. Readers on Goodreads and Amazon echo that same range: some come back to The Lady in Red, others to Success, Obsession, Childhood, Stillness, Not a Feminist, or Listen. Across every one of these book reviews of Folded Away Softly, the same idea keeps surfacing in different words: that this isn’t a book you have to sit and finish; it’s one you can open at random and still feel it land.
If any of the poems named across these reviews struck a chord, the surest way to feel the rest of the collection is to sit with it yourself. Grab a copy here [insert your product link].
And if you’ve already read it, I’d love to hear which poem stayed with you longest.
Reviews on Goodreads help other readers find the books that are actually right for them, not just the ones that are popular, so if this collection moved you, leaving a line or two there takes only a couple of minutes and genuinely helps:
Leave a review on Goodreads
More book reviews of Folded Away Softly will be added here as they come in; check back if you’re still deciding whether it belongs on your shelf.