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Saturday, August 8, 2015

S.O.A.R – Success Over Adversity Reigns by Abir Mukherjee : A Review



TITLE: S.O.A.R – Success Over Adversity Reigns
AUTHOR: Abir Mukherjee
HOW I RECEIVED THIS COPY:
          I thank Kamal Paneru for this review copy.
BOOK SUMMARY:
          Frustrated with their current jobs, Uday, Adhyayan, and Rajasekaran team up to start an innovative business, non-existent in India until then. Ignoring all pragmatic aspects of life, they chase their dreams with immense pleasure. However, their journey is no cakewalk, as they confront financial crisis and rejections soon. Uday plays a business trick to triumph over that uninfluenced market; it works initially, but soon boomerangs, blowing the team apart. The police arrests Uday accusing him of illegal activity by his organization. Were there any blemishes in their plan or was it just a typical Indian market, reluctant to accept an un-experimented concept? Will they be successful in implementing their innovation, staking their hard earned money, stable jobs, relationships, and life 'S.O.A.R is the story of chasing a dream, quandary between desire and responsibility, friendship and love. Join the gutsy journey of three young entrepreneurs.
BOOK REVIEW:
          S.O.A.R – Success Over Adversity Reigns. The first thing that drew me to this book was its unique title and its equally engrossing summary. S.O.A.R is a simple story of three people and their families, their aims in life, their past, present and future. It is a chronicle of hope, despair, longing and eventual success over all adversities. Three friends, Adhyayan, Uday and Rajasekaran work in an office together. Circumstances in their life and their priorities as they go through turbulence are what the story is all about.
The premise/ plot of the story:
          The premise of the story itself is interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention. The story clearly shows the difficulties faced by entrepreneurs in India. The professional journey of the individuals that clashes with their personal lives and their hopes and ideals is one roller coaster ride of emotions. Adhyayan, or Adi is struggling with a loving wife Srishti, unable to devote enough time for her even though he loves her deeply. Uday, who has had a troubled childhood, growing up without a father, thinks that life is about making a name for himself in business and doggedly goes behind his dream with a sole purpose. Rajasekaran is a timid man from Chennai who has landed a job in Bangalore and falls in love with Sneha, a fiery rebellious Bengali, struggling with parents who don’t care much about her.
General Story Development:
          The background story of each character is presented in bits and pieces through the book and it is left to the reader to make the connections and inferences. If you follow the book from cover to cover, you will be able to fully appreciate the back – stories. If you are a reader who skims through paragraphs to quickly finish the story, you will miss out, for instance, on why Uday is so insistent on making his dream come true even at the cost of losing his job. Or why Adi seems to be oscillating between nations and what his actual priorities in life are. And if you don’t actually carefully read and absorb every line, you will never know that Raja actually speaks Tamil in the book!
The pace of the story:
          For the story to be engaging, engrossing and complete, the necessity arises for it to have back stories and flashbacks. But the transition between the flashbacks and present events is not smooth. Sometimes the readers are quickly brought back to the present or abruptly taken to the past and it would leave anyone momentarily disoriented. The author could have used a date wise chronicling or at least some such differentiation to make the readers understand which part of the story is the flashback and which part is the present.
          Also, there are moments when some events are left to the reader’s guess and some important life changing moments are written in passing lines. The story of Srishti’s baby totally caught me unawares. I had to read through the lines again. It was mentioned in the passing, and considering the importance of the event, it could have had a little more dramatic effect. This again reiterates the feeling that to get the true feeling of the story, we would have to read it line by line.
The language, grammar and phrasing:
          A story needs powerful memorable prose / dialogues as much as it needs a good plotline. A good plot could fall flat if the writing doesn’t match it. The feelings of each character could be expressed with a much deeper impact on readers based only on the flawlessness or fluency of the language. This story’s writing needs a bit more polishing. It would have worked wonders and made the already interesting story much more memorable and this book would have become a comfort book that people would read again and again if the language had been a bit more structured. There are obvious grammar errors and some unavoidable typos that ruin the fast moving plot. But these are not very major and definitely not unheard of.
          The use of certain words does seem like the author created the lines just to use synonyms of the more popular, and fitting alternatives. Some words do seem vaguely out of context and using their preferred normal alternative could have been a better option. Thankfully, Raja’s method of speaking in email abbreviations was commented upon in the story itself. But a seasoned reader cannot help but feel that sometimes the phrasing in the book is like Yoda speaking. (The title should have been warning enough. It did sound like an improbably confusing acronym. But don’t let it deter you!)
The Overall Summary:
          The book will not disappoint you. The story is engrossing and the plot is thick with all the elements necessary to make a bestseller drama. The language is not much of a hurdle either. You can easily understand what the story is about. If you could get over the language and event placement, and delve into the story as such, you would appreciate the nuances and the actual plot. This book has the potential to become a major commercial success. Go for this one, you would really enjoy the friendship between the lead characters, the dreams, aspirations and over the course of the book you will find yourselves travelling with the characters themselves.
RATING : 4/5 (Purely for the content. The story could work wonders with a little more polishing!)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

          Abir Mukherjee was born and brought up in Bardhaman, a small town of West Bengal. He is currently based in U.S.A having completed more than 8 years as an IT Professional. He has completed his B.E. in computer science and engineering in 2005 and started working in different software MNCs. ‘S.O.A.R’ is his second novel. Blackbuck Publication has published his first novel, ‘As Life Has No Undo’.
          He loves to sketch and write in his spare time. He writes to entertain people, not to teach them how to live life, how to be successful in life or any other philosophical lessons.
PURCHASE LINKS:
Amazon.in: (Rs. 125)
Flipkart.com: (Rs. 106)
Crossword: (Rs. 125)
Landmark: (Rs.88)


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