Books

I used to write the book reviews on my other blog but I am not able to post on it even occasionally so I thought I would rather record my books on this blog only. Don’t worry. I am not making it a regular feature. I am just gonna post this on weekends and weekdays I will talk beauty. Yeah, I know I have hardly been talking since the last month!!

Anyways, I had been dying to read a good book since a long time. And, then I found this in one of the airports but I hardly got time to open it till last 15 days. But, once opened, I was totally hooked to it. Now, what is the book about? 

Well, this is one of the books which tries to create a fictional plot based on the life of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly and his wife, Mary Shelly, the author of Frankenstein. It tries to unravel the mysteries of the poet’s childhood traumas, the suicides surrounding the figure, his marriages, his love affaires and the death of his kids.

Fanny Imlay, elder step-sister of Mary Shelly, commits suicide. Harriet Westbrook, first wife of Shelly, is abandoned by Shelly and later gets pregnant, though it is debatable by whom, is also found drowned in Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. Soon after the first wife’s death, Shelly gets married to Mary and leaves London along-with his newly wed wife and her step-sister, Claire.

It has been indicated that Claire and Shelly have intimate relations but it was never really made clear. But, the tragedy of Mary and Shelly’s marriage also lies in the fact that none of their first three children and one adopted daughter survive. It is believed that Shelly’s life was haunted with his own past and was prone to bouts of melancholy and depression. He was also highly delusional. 

Thus, this books creates a fictional thriller piece using all the associated characters and real-life incidents. It definitely is an amazing book for all crime and thriller lovers. It is supposed to be a sequel to Tom-All-Alone’s but the book can be read independently as well.

When ever I sit to write down a book review, it really scares me. It is so difficult to review someone else’s work which is something they have believed in. If you hate it, their entire work goes down the drain and the hope is just extinguished. That does not mean I rave all the books I have read till date but I do try to be very objective when I am reading the book. It is no longer about whether you have enjoyed it or not but it is about telling everyone what they can find for themselves in the book. But, yes, ultimately the review is biased because not everyone looks at the book holistically, not even the author.

Well, I think that was a nice introduction, right? Anyways, I would rather start talking about the book now. The premise of the book is a story of two people spanning from the moment they meet to the end. Well, the end is something you have to figure out for yourself. It is their story which sometimes becomes too larger than life, too cliched, too bollywood-y but remnants of which does tug at your heart strings.

Aditya is a billionaire who was born for cricket but the family business was his purpose. Radha is an extremely pragmatic person who believes in her principles and ideologies so much that she fails to understand the world is gray and not just black and white. And, what happens is their life of ups and downs and what each other really mean in their lives.

I have not read the author’s previous works but I will say that he has tried to put down an epic love story when he was writing this. The novel is divided into four parts – the story starts with their teens when they meet, their late teens, their late twenties and the  thirties. The language is clean and decent when I compare with the amount of usage of Indian slangs. 

Regarding the plot, the story moves very slowly in the first part. The author spends too much time in describing the emotions which Adi and Radha go through. It would have been better if he had inspired those emotions in the reader instead of just explaining them. Somehow probably a reader who does not belong to the social class of Adi would never really connect with those happenings in his life because its something you get to see in the movies than in real life.

The second part is a little detached where both Adi and Radha are struggling to maintain their long-distance friendship and balance their lives minus each other. This is where other significant people enter their respective lives and they start drifting apart. The twenties are more of a haze when Adi returns into Radha’s life after two years of complete absence. All this while, most part of the story is narrated by Radha through her diary entries. 

But, the most significant and maturely handled part was the last one in which both are in their thirties and it is sort of a climax to their lives. They are together and still they can never get together. It is sort of a paradox. The epic which Rohit aimed at was not completely successful in my opinion because I felt the story did drag a bit in parts but yes few other parts of the story will definitely move you. All in all, it ends as a good read.

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