Review of The Journey to Success

[Peace Odii]

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "The Journey to Success" by Pavithra Srinivasan.]

---

2 out of 4 stars

---

Share This Review

---

Parth, a young man from India, was frustrated with the degrading status of his family. Being a middle-class family, Parth's family had to struggle to get every comfort they desired. But even with all their struggle, they were lacking in almost everything. Resulting from the stress of labor, his father became bedridden. This was the final push Parth needed to move into the next phase of his life. It is a move he made amid the uncertainty of his future. He decided to travel to Australia in search of greener pastures, away from home and the comfort of family. After many years in Australia, Parth has now returned to India. Find out in this book how his Australia stay was. Did he get what he had expected from Australia? Or had Australia served him a different experience?

The Journey to Success by Niyati Patel is an inspirational genre about the life of migrants. The story's main focus was to create awareness of life away from home in search of fame and money. As stated in the book, the author was petitioned to Australia by her parents, who had gone before her to work. Exposure to the foreign lifestyle and migrants' struggles inspired her to write this book. Being her first project, The Journey to Success was a well-thought-out book. The plot, twists, turns, and drama in the book was engaging. The flow of conversations between the characters was also entertaining. I liked this about the book.

The part of the book that I disliked was that the whole book was piled into one interview session. It seemed very fictitious that a whole narrative was compiled in one interview session. At some point, I realized there was a mix-up in the tenses. The author no longer used past tense in the storytelling, but there was now a mix-up of past and present tenses. The content stated that the story would be written as a flashback, so the author should have stuck to the use of only past tenses.

In Parth's reminiscence, the other characters who he was telling about were also doing a flashback of their life. This happened when Parth was explaining his meeting with Jiya in Australia. In the narration of his life in Australia, it seemed absurd that another flashback should be going on simultaneously. The author should have compiled the summary of the other characters to fit Parth's story rather than telling it all at once. This was also repeated in his conversation with Tega, Jiya's roommate. This made the book tiring to read.

Another thing I noted was that the chapters were not in synchrony with the narrative. An example of this was the breakup chapter. According to the chapter title, Chapter 9 was meant to be the breakup, but the breakup happened in Chapter 11. This was not the only instance. Others followed this same pattern. I wouldn't say I liked this about the book.

The editorial aspect of the book was not correctly done. Many sentences were wrongly written, the tenses were wrongly used, and punctuation marks were not correctly placed. For these reasons, I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars. The storyline was very inspiring, but it was not well written. I recommend this book to readers who enjoy adventure series.

******
The Journey to Success
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon

[Israel10]

I liked that the story's main focus was to create awareness of life away from home in search of fame and money. Great review.

[Juliet Keith]

Thank you for the review. I wish the author had given the book a little bit more of professionalism, I would have definitely read it.

[Radhika Nair]

I read some books by authors of the diaspora in college, so the theme of this book is familiar to me. I'm sorry it was not up to the mark though. Thank you for your review.