Book Criticism is a challenging profession. Many a time you are challenged with a book that tests your patience, other time your comprehension skills and attitude. This debut work of Mr. Ashutosh Srivastav challenged me on the first front. It tested my patience like no other book. The book discusses the youth and youthfulness of a certain Mr. Rudra who meets not one but 17 girls during the said duration. I read about first five of them and that's that. Till the fourth entry, everything seemed logical, even somewhat genuine. In came fifth and some more of the knowledge that preceded with each last chapter and a girl and I was done. Mr. Ashutosh has filled this book with 285 pages. They are a lot of pages for a debutant writer. He can certainly write and plan. He tries to put forth a perspective, a story and plan for each of his girl and chapter but the issues is with the trying part itself. Ashutosh tries to clarify that not each of them Rudra has fallen in love with and neither all of them even hit on him and it's praiseworthy that he celebrates a category that always fall in that 'cliched' in-between but those outcomes or perspectives that are coming out of each chapter aren't inspiring enough. First of all, it's hard enough to speak of having 17 girls in one's life, harder still is to elaborate on their importance in the said person's life. No wonder if a reader loses count of all the previous girls and their names if he is somewhere fixated in the middle of the book. I found this book devoid of all logic and it makes for an uninspiring read.
On the technical fronts, it scores more than it loses upon. I nevertheless had the problem with book cover though. If your book's title is as big as 'I Cud Have Had 17.....But I Chose to Have 19 Chapters', you might have done away with spelling even poor 'cud' right. What was Could's fault in it, I didn't understand. Editing, as it's become quite a norm now, is poorly done. 'Did Not + Verb's 2nd form' find their presence in many pages and leave a sophisticated reader in bad taste. Spacing between two words at places is lost and they look oddly conjoined. But for a paperback edition, page quality is exemplary. However, the blurb and author's bio on the back cover is written in very fine print; author's bio seems even fading in front of your eyes. These dissimilarities need to be worked upon immediately for they don't make the book look 'good' in reader's eye. We have already discussed the plot-lines in detail, so that's a serious no-go. However, I shall award points to this book mainly on the basis of massive efforts put in by Mr. Srivastav and shall congratulate and bid him good luck for future endeavors.
Rating: 2.5/5
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