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Book Review: Sorry! I Loved You

"Sorry! I Loved You" is the debut work of Mr. Saksham Mittal. First of all, I shall like to congratulate him for picking up a pen and daring to write a book. Writing is a noble profession and not everyone's cup of tea. As of late, Indian literary society is witnessing a surge in the number of potential debutantes and this is partially has to do with increasing internet penetration in country. Then there are companies like Amazon and many new age publishers who are giving a platform to all the aspiring writers. So almost everyone is writing nowadays and they are getting published too. They are even getting promoted very heavily and although I don't know what they need to do to bag the tag of a 'bestselling book', they still manage to stir the plot quite a bit. There is a great side-effect to this phenomenon too. Since almost all of them are writing, the most of them 'almost' are coming up with meaningless, soulless and despicable matter-in-hand. Unfortunately, Mr. Mittal doesn't do anything anything to turn the tide in his favor and whatever matter is in there in his book (I only read 24 pages, that too with great difficulty), his publisher too hasn't helped him in that regard. You can read the blurb or even a summary of it anywhere on any book-selling portal so I wouldn't waste my time elaborating on them but I would like to do the same for pointing the mistakes that plague this book.

A story will be a story. Judging it might be subjective. For someone, it might be good; for another, not so good, even loathsome. So I wouldn't critic the story part of it but since anyone can ask me that how can I judge a book by only going through 24 pages of it, I would like to justify my take on that matter. You see, reviewing the literature is quite similar to reviewing a movie. So when one goes to watch a movie and finds out that lead actors are limping badly with their dialogue-delivery and cannot act according to the situation despite the 'promising plot',you need not be an Einstein to think that this movie is going to bomb on box office. Similarly, here in this book, I found the basic premise completely at fault. Till page 24, I found enough grammatical mistakes to decide not to move any further with it. Take for example: 'My eyes didn't WANTED to move'. This is a fundamental problem. Using the second form of verb in a negative sentence of Past Indefinite Tense is completely unacceptable to me and then on page 16, once is spelled as 'onve'. Another miss: 'She DANCE so well' on page 18. I am not going to illustrate what else are there on pages 17, 23 and 24. Prepositions are missing. Sentence formation goes out for a toss. Quality of pages and printing, another deterrent and thus I literally found out myself in a dilemma whether I should blame the author of this book for all these mishaps or its publisher and proofreaders. You must have understood, hopefully, by now that 'correct language and grammar' are the basic ingredients of a book and even if you are not a 'notorious Grammar Nazi', you are bound to cringe over these mistakes. In this way, I cannot coerce myself into giving this book more than one mark out of five. That 'one mark' shall mark the efforts Mr. Saksham has put up with in coming up with this book.

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