I well remember a time, and it was not very long ago either, when any young person in love with books was considered the most boring personality on earth. Of course, I suppose every class in every school had the misfortune of having at least a couple such boring trespassers.
Then Chetan Bhagat happened. And all of a sudden, reading books became the cool thing. YA fiction became the new literature, much, I’m afraid, to the chagrin of ‘old’ readers. And writing novels became the hobby of choice for engineering and management students.
The book that I am reviewing in this post is also the result of this phenomenon. It’s written by a youth, about the youth, and for the youth. The book is titled ‘In Love: Once & Forever.’ It’s written by Mr. K. Krishna Kumar and published by Cyberwit.net.
First of all, I’d like to thank the author for sending me the autographed copy of his book. As I read the book, I could feel the hope and passion with which it was written.
Well, the book is a coming of age novel wherein a young boy grows up into his manhood facing and accepting the hurdles that life raises in every young person’s life. We meet him when he is but a young boy in school, and through the 150 pages of this book we accompany him as he struggles with his love and passion and submits to and learns from the bitter lessons that life teaches.
The book is written in very simple and straightforward way. The language is simple, and so is the narration. The author does display his good vocabulary, but I felt the big words stood out a bit uncomfortably in the fabric of his otherwise simple narration. For example, the author describes the chapattis made by his mother as ‘The opulence in its taste could scarcely satisfy my hunger.’ The ‘opulence’ here felt a bit too corpulent to me.
The book reads like a diary of a young boy, describing the day to day events and happening of a school and college life. It clearly reveals the workings of a young boy’s heart and head. His fears, his hopes, his wishes and desires are all depicted clearly by the hero’s in his first person narration.
The hero of the story is an average school boy. He is good in studies, but not so good in looks. He is fat, useless in sports and has a squinty eye. But he is a very positive person who takes even his squint as gift from God. Even when he suffers a bitter loss, he learns from it and moves on.
As far as the story goes, it’s a usual boy-fall-in-love-with-classmate-but-can’t-express story. I don’t know how much of it is fiction, but to me, much of the content seemed inspired from the author’s own life and experience. And if this is the case, I am sure the author must have felt very acutely the events he describes in his book. However, the story that he recounts is told and re-told every day within a million hearts across the world. So the book has nothing new to offer. The events mentioned in the book might feel intense to a person going through them. But I failed to feel that intensity while reading about them, maybe because I am a decade too old from the age group the book targets. A younger reader might probably feel otherwise.
