JUST A FEW LIES: BOOK REVIEW

Title: Just A Few Lies

Author: Sandeep Sharma

Format: Kindle eBook

Total Number of Pages: 136

Kindle Price: INR 49

Publisher: Author Paradise Publishers

Publication Date: 25th May 2017

Language: English

ASIN: B071J4N3TJ

Book Description:

Understanding Writer’s mind is a complicated thing. He imagines, presumes and sometimes anticipates the reality and tries to blend with fiction. He is someone who stays in stories much more than in reality. His mind is full of giant maze but what happens when maze starts to peep out of imagination and enter the reality?

Anant, a bestselling ‘Superstar’ author is feeling that words have started to betray him and that’s why he starts to search for the ‘next Anant’ and be involved in the making of the next superstar.

Mystically, one day he reads Sagarika’s blog and gets amazed to know that all her blog posts are inspired from real life incidents of Anant himself. On the other hand, Anant’s problem of having hallucinations about random things is coming back in his life. Earlier those hallucinations were totally strange but now even those hallucinations make sense.

What exactly is happening with Anant?

Who this Sagarika really is?

What lies are being spoken in the veil of finding next ‘Superstar Bestselling Author’?

Answer lies behind ‘Just A Few Lies’.

Review by Sohinee Dey

Book Title

The book title ‘Just A Few Lies’ is an attractive title chosen by the author. It’s simple yet I was fascinated by the title. You know,when you see a title and you think “I need to read this book”, it was that kind of a title for me. Also, it is justified within the plot of this book.

Book Cover

The book cover isn’t as good as the title and neither does it hold any meaning to the story. It would have been better if the cover was more interesting and had some connection with the story. It failed to impress me. Seems like the author forgot to pay attention to the cover while he was crafting the plot! An engaging story requires an equally engaging and interesting cover.

Plot

Well frankly, I am not so sure about how to explain the plot and what I thought about it. Mainly, the plot revolves around the central character, Anant who is an eminent writer and is quite famous for his novels and very popular amongst the females fans. He is more of a celebrity author and crowned as a ‘superstar’ due to his bestsellers. But a time comes when he falls under the spell of a writer’s block and is unable to craft the plot and put words in his characters’ mouths. Then he is struck with this whimsical idea that if he can’t write any more books he would bring in the next ‘Anant’ so that the creativity isn’t lost. His search for the next ‘Anant’ begins and unexpectedly he stumbles upon Sagarika’s blog. When he reads the blog posts he is surprised to find that the posts are inspired from his own life and finds traces of similarities with situations and events which he has faced himself in his real life. Previously Anant had problems with hallucinations and he feels that the hallucinations are back to haunt him. It’s a total chaos. He seeks out to reach to the core of these hallucinations and the recent turn of events in his life with the arrival of Sagarika.

The plot though mysterious and filled with suspense was not successful in thrilling or engaging me. The plotline was really good but it seemed to me as if the author himself got confused with the storyline while he was writing it. It started getting too confusing and the events got more twisted as I was proceeding into the story. I was finding it hard to create a connection as to what was happening inside the book. It felt as if the author was having a hard time in keeping his plot from getting too complicated but unfortunately, that is exactly what happened.

Sub-plot

The idea of the sub-plot was really good but it kind of got entwined with the main plot. Bringing in Sagarika into the story and stretching the sub-plot to an extent where it started getting confusing, well, it wasn’t so good of an idea. The only thing that could be reasoned and had meaning was Anant’s friendship with his childhood friend, and his relationship with his wife. Other than that, everything was in a chaos.

Characters

This book only has on an average, 5 characters; Anant, the bestselling author; Raman, his childhood friend and publisher; Kavya, Anant’s wife; Sagarika, Anant’s fan and Alka Thakur, the mysterious old lady.

So, as I have already mentioned that the plot is mainly concentrated on Anant, I felt as if the supporting characters didn’t get enough space in the plot neither were they developed completely. The sudden appearances of new characters only made the plotline more complicated rather than creating mystery and suspense.

Narration

The narration was in third person and maintained throughout the book. The narrative skills of the author wasn’t so engaging as I skipped many paragraphs and skipped many chapters. The narration could have been better but it bordered on more of an amateurish level.

Language and Vocabulary

The language is simple and same can be said for the vocabulary. It was too simple for me and failed to woo me.

Grammar and punctuation

There were no such grammar mistakes but there were many punctuation errors. Looks like the manuscript wasn’t edited and proofread properly. The punctuation errors were a turn off for me. Spacing is good but you don’t put a space before a comma, period, quotation marks and exclamation marks! Everything has its use but using it incorrectly only ends up making you look stupid.

My Final Verdict—

At first I thought this book was going to be a good read since the author has already penned two bestsellers but it didn’t turn out as good as I thought it would be. The plotline and the idea was really good but when you can’t carry it out properly in your book, it ends up being boring and fails to engage the readers. Well, mystery and suspense is not everyone’s cup of tea!

Well, this book can be read once for sure. No harm in that. Go ahead and peek inside if you want to; there’s always a choice of not continuing with it!

Book title: 3.5/5

Book Cover: 1/5

Plot: 2.5/5

Sub-plot: 2.5/5

Characters: 2/5

Narration: 3/5

Language and Vocabulary: 3/5

Grammar and Punctuation: 2/5

I’ll give this book 2 stars out of 5.

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Thank you for reading! You can comment down your thoughts on this review or if you have read it let me know what you thought of it :).

For book reviews, send an email to donadey01@gmail.com

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