Genre:
Thriller/Romance
Pages: 150
Edition: paperback, kindle edition
Publisher: Educreation Publishing
Year of publication: 2018
RATING: ✰✰✰ (3/5)
Synopsis:
This is the first book in the
Light-year trilogy.
The plot opens like this-- Avipsa
is a budding engineer from Calcutta, a very capable and hardworking girl who is
trying out campus placements to land up in her dream job. Meanwhile, on the
other side of the country in Mumbai, Reyansh is having a hard time bouncing
back from the break-up with his previous partner, Mahika.
On one side, Avipsa is bright,
optimistic and eager to step into the professional world, but on contrary,
Reyansh is plunged into heavy depression, melancholy and has nothing to look
forward too.
Their paths cross when Avipsa
attends a family function in Mumbai. Although Reyansh vouches that only Mahika
has his heart, he becomes quite fond of Avipsa once they meet and Avipsa
reciprocates that feeling. A beautiful bond develops between the two. While
Reyansh needs the girl to show him light and haul him up from the darkness he
had been living in, Avipsa is delighted to get Reyansh as an understanding and
lovable companion. More feelings emerge between the two but some of them are
only one sided. They continue to develop a healthy friendship until both of
them progress in their career. But when Avipsa shifts to Bangalore for her job,
she entangles her life with an unknown stalker who somehow continuously manages
to infiltrate into her personal life and affect her mental health. She tries
hard to catch hold of the person but with bare minimum success. With Reyansh’s
help, will she be able to sort out her life?
REVIEW:
Title: ✰✰✰(3/10)
I couldn’t figure out what the
title had to do with the story. One implication that I could fathom was maybe
‘if we last’ is talking about existential crises, and is harping on the
fundamental basis of lifeline. But even after this, it still remains extremely
vague. Even the name of the series is odd and unrelated at least to the first
book in this series. Coming across the term ‘light-year’, the first thing that
comes to my mind is fantasy. But the book is of romance genre with specks of
horror/thrill and I don’t think is resonates with these feelings.
The author has desperately tried
to make the title catchy and striking. The
basic purpose of a title to any piece of literature is to cover the whole thing
under its aegis and thereby giving a broad overview to the write-up. Sorry to
say, this title didn’t do any justice to the story whatsoever.
Writing style: ✰✰✰✰✰✰✰(7/10)
Although this author is new to
the industry, her writing style isn’t all bland. She has taken considerable amount
of time to put up the plot brick by brick. The descriptive and elaborative elements
to the story are well structured with a meticulous choice of words. Since the
book deals with young, vulnerable people, the author has been keen enough to portray
their emotional conflicts and consciences in detail. But she went overboard at
times-- with flowery words and unnecessary complications to put up something
simple. The author has also added analytical and philosophical aspects to the
story while explaining how her characters were feeling, making certain portions
of the story very quotable. In all, the writing style was fresh and engaging,
but wasn’t consolidated enough throughout and lacked consistency.
Plot and characterisation: ✰✰✰✰✰(5/10)
Coming straight to point, there was
nothing very genuine or engaging about the plot. The entire story (excluding
the stalker and hallucinations part) can be summed as: a bright young girl falling
in love with a depressed guy and saving him from the dread. The plotline was quite
linear and uneventful. The book screams to be a thriller, but the thrill
element only starts to happen in the last few pages of the book. To be honest,
the story should have had more substance to it. The book ended too quickly, with
hardly any plot advancement in the thrill aspect. There ought to be a million questions
in the mind of the reader by the time the book winded up, but none of it was
actually answered. The first book in a series (in my humble experience) starts off
the plot and lets the sub-plots run haywire and although it slowly approaches
towards the mega climax, it doesn’t save all explanations and tying up of loose
ends for the last book of the series. But this book seemed like an introduction,
with no standalone capability. If someone takes up the book by itself, he/she
won’t be satisfied at all. The books of a series almost always push the reader
to the next book and holds his interest intact, but it does it in a way that
the book by itself has substance and is capable of making a place in the reader’s
heart. Sadly, this book didn’t do that for me.
The pace of the plot was very slow,
and the chapters flooded with repetitive things. The plotline was extremely
flat and buoyed only by the complex feelings of the protagonists. As mentioned
before, the character development was great and their insecurities were
highlighted well. The emotions felt by them
wasn’t absurd and sudden, but it slowly came up as one line of thought led to
another. One of the major plus points about the book was the depiction of character
psychology and very vivid imageries to support the same. Having said that, the
characters were not extremely original or striking. There was nothing very special
that I got from the characters, and so probably they weren’t very unique and
real to me. Also, the daily life hardships of the characters have been very
blandly omitted. It seemed everything was happening in a very perfect world, where
none of the characters were in the middle of any material crisis in their independent
lifestyle. There were emotional crises obviously, but since the story is set in
modern India in metropolitan city locations, I longed for some urban details all
throughout. Life in cities is not as sugar coated and smooth as depicted in the
story—and they are a part of our lives, as much our mind and emotions are. So, the
writer should have added some surrounding details to hold the plot up.
My opinions:
To sum up, the book could have
been much better if the author had put effort to develop the plot in a panoramic
way, rather than only talking about feelings and emotions alone. We needed more
insight into the lives of the protagonists, to understand the roots of their
dilemmas and trace our way back to where it all started for them. The author couldn’t
connect the various elements of the story together in a wholesome way and so it
did not have that engrossing factor.
Even with all this, the author
has done a great job to give her best to write what she had in her heart, and I
respect that. I hope the next books in the series turn out to be exceedingly
interesting and that I can finish the trilogy with bated breath and absolute
awe.
Disclaimer: This review is in lieu of a review copy.
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