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Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Even God Doesn't Know Rajeev Pundir : A Review



BOOK TITLE: Even God Doesn’t Know
AUTHOR: Rajeev Pundir
GENRE: Fiction/ Romance
NUMBER OF PAGES: 355
FORMAT: Paperback
SERIES / STANDALONE: Standalone
REVIEW BY: Dhivya Balaji
HOW I GOT THIS BOOK: Blackbuck publications sent us a copy in exchange for an honest review.
SUMMARY:
Amar and Akbar are bosom friends. Rekha is their classmate while studying in an engineering college. Where Akbar and Rekha fall in love, Amar also has a crush for Rekha which changes into a one-sided love affair and gradually into an obsession. He continues to endure his feelings for Rekha for years together, silently.

A sudden mishappening changes the lives of all three in a single night. The novel unfolds the story of the threesome lead by infatuation, possessiveness, obsession, love, hate, doubt and greed against the backdrop of premonitions.
REVIEW:
          Some books start out very promisingly. They offer you some sort of sneak peek into how the book is actually going to progress. Then there are some books that make you want to pick them up by the summary given in the back cover. Then there are books that impress you in the first line of the first page. And finally, there are books that crash your expectations in the subsequent chapters so much so that you want to close the book and be done with it.
          The word in the summary made the reader cringe. It is ‘mishap’ not ‘mishappening’.  Overcoming the obvious misspelling and already wondering about the editing, I picked up the book. The opening pages containing the first prologue, was mildly interesting, and it made me sit up and think maybe, just maybe, the book might prove to be interesting.
          But over the course of the story (the plot is a triangular love story) that hopes to portray the struggles of budding, blossoming love, sacrifice and all those gentler emotions, somehow, somewhere, there is always a sour feeling because of the substandard way of writing and editing.
          The story might have made it big, and had more of an impression in the minds of the reader if only the reader themselves didn’t feel the urge to correct the word phrasing and grammar (occasionally spellings). What could have been a really nice love triangle that never goes larger than life falters in the shoddily written dialogs. It fails to stay in the mind.
          There is the typical middle class struggle, of the poor unable to afford coaching, to the pangs of young love, the story has it all. But basically, there is that thorn. If you are not a seasoned reader, or if you don’t feel the urge to correct misspellings, or if you can overcome the language to enjoy the story, go for this.
WHAT I LIKED: The opening pages.
WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER: Language, story construction, and the whole drab areas of description.
VERDICT: If you can digest the writing, the story can manage to make an impact.
RATING: 2/5
EDITIONS AVAILABLE: Paperback
PRICE: Rs. 171 for Paperback

BOOK LINKS: http://www.flipkart.com/even-god-doesn-t-know-english/p/itmdxw8sfag7dqhf?pid=9781630415976#overview

5 comments:

  1. Dear sir/madam,
    To upgrade your knowledge i would like to apprise you that there's very much a word 'Mishappening' in English and often used to describe an unfortunate incident. I think you are totally dependent on MS Word which has its own limitations. You can check yourself on internet. Moreover, original writers are known even to coin new words. I think with your limited knowledge you're not a competent person to write a review. Have you gone through other reviews also about this book?
    Pl. see:
    mishappening
    Verb

    Present participle of mishappen.

    Noun

    (plural mishappenings)

    An unfortunate incident.

    English Wiktionary. Available under CC-BY-SA license.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Please read through our comments for our answer to you, Sir.

      Delete
  2. Thanks for pointing out about the word 'Mishappening'. Thankfully, the wiki link you provided showed us the definition and also told that the word is obsolete. That means it is not a word in use. But no doubt a man who finishes almost every sentence (those containing speech quotes) in his book with "said he" or "said she". I guess you thought using obsolete and archaic (at least according to you) English will give the readers an idea of your proficiency in the language.

    Not to burst your happy bubble sir, there are a few meagre mistakes I would like to point out. If you would care to explain the use of these words in this phrasing, kindly enlighten us. But please have the patience to read through the whole comment before you reply. I will take a 'no reply' from you as an acceptance of all the errors I have pointed out in these comments.

    The LIST OF MISTAKES:

    Prologue line two

    "Silence on the street was rant apart by the relentless..."

    The word rant means

    (Verb) 'Speak or shout at length in an angry, impassioned way.'
    As in "she was still ranting on about the unfairness of it all"

    Or

    (Noun)’ a spell of ranting; a tirade.’
    as in "his rants against organized religion"

    I think you had, naturally, with your extreme grasp over the English language, some other word in mind, but ended up using this word. But mere readers cannot understand the word you had in mind, if you would not be so kind as to put it in writing.

    And the third line (IN THE SAME PROLOGUE)

    "Fiercely penetrating into the thick dark cover..."

    Penetrating means

    (adjective) able to make a way through or into something.
    "the problem of penetrating damp"

    (verb) go into or through (something), especially with force or effort.
    "the shrapnel had penetrated his head"

    You will notice that nowhere does the word 'into' come after the word penetrate, because the word itself means 'going into' something. No doubt with your creative writers' license you can use a double emphasis word. But poor English enthusiasts and primary school teachers will flinch at this sort of word phrasing and grammar.

    ReplyDelete
  3. In the same prologue page, the second paragraph (phrase?)

    "It was 12:54 past midnight"

    That is, according to correct grammar, "Fifty four minutes past midnight" or "12:54 A.M." or "12:54 in the night". If we were to take your phrase literally, it means 12 hours and 54 minutes past that midnight, which will, unfortunately, be around mid day (noon) the next day. Definitely authors are above such trivialities such as time and space. Especially authors like you.

    And numerous grammatical errors and phrasing errors such as "She wanted to make sure of who the person was at the door knocking from outside" instead of "She wanted to be sure of..." etc, etc.

    It's never safe to open the door for a stranger that too at 'this' odd hour. Seriously, sir? Tense confusion?
    Grammatically it has to be 'that' odd hour. But writers, according to you, are above grammar.

    In the same page,
    "But why..." she enquired again confusingly.


    'confusingly' means she is confusing others. I think the word you were looking for is 'confusedly'.


    The penultimate line of the page

    "Is it Amar's house?"


    The grammatically correct sentence is "Is this Amar's house?"


    Kindly note that these errors are from the first page of the start of your novel. ONE SINGLE PAGE.
    Not a wider sample of chapters or pages or even the whole book. We request you to consider asking someone who knows his/her English and will not care about insulting an over large ego to check the grammatical correction of these sentences. And while you are at it, the whole book.

    Another random page I reread now, Chapter 8, the first line

    'Although Amar and Akbar were enrolled in separate sections, but they...'

    Grammar dictates that the word 'Although' and 'but' need not be used together in the same sentence because they are redundant.

    And after a lot of such 'petty' errors, another random page I opened now, chapter 57, that says,

    "The cab was stand still waiting to pass the procession..."

    Did you mean to say "The cab was standing still waiting for the procession to pass..."?

    There are numerous other errors in between and after this that I do not wish to waste my time pointing out.

    Finally, a few pointers to your esteemed self.

    1) If you are not able to handle criticisms in reviews, you should have prevented the publishers from sending us the book for an honest review. We do not hide our review policies from anyone, and if you have the time, go through other reviews in our blog to know our policies better.

    2) The blog is run by two women. (No doubt you cover the ambiguity with your Sir/Madam) and we cannot expect someone so busy as you with your own self to check the details about the reviewer and avoid this generalisation error.

    3) I ask you to put up this book review (or any other reviews for that matter) with any grammar/spell checking software hitherto unknown to us and point out my grammar errors, if any. But a kind word of free advice, please do not confuse the same software by uploading your book's draft.

    4) This entire answer was typed directly into the browser (which found out errors only in the phrases I copied from your book and we DID NOT use MS word for this.

    5) We have had the pleasure of reading other authors who do not take 'an author's creative license to invent words (that are not even understandable to the reader' as an excuse to churn out such literary classics.

    Finally, if your esteemed self would clear a doubt, sir, did somebody send out a draft you wrote in a hurry without bothering about spelling or grammar to us instead of your published book? Because it sure seems so.

    Thank you for your patience

    ReplyDelete
  4. Footnote:

    The comment section of the browser is not enough to point out the errors in the book, which was why we had to use two comments to point out the errors in a SINGLE page. Imagine our chagrin if we were to read and point out from the whole book!

    ReplyDelete

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