Official Review: the sacred darkness

[lily_kh87]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "the sacred darkness" by shantanu bhattacherjee.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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The Sacred Darkness is a young adult novel written by Shantanu Bhattacherjee. It is about a group of three friends; Deep, Patrik and Tarun. Deep is the narrator of the events, he tells us his journey to find the other two friends who have been missing since a decade. The story begins when they all meet at college; they have a normal life like any other kid starting his freshman year until one day they decide to join a secret society in Kolkata.

One day, Deep finds that his life becomes in danger because of the secret society so he decides to leave. Ten years later, he regrets leaving his friends behind, so he starts a quest to reunite with them. He goes back to Kolkata to look for them, but he can’t seem to find them anywhere. He finds out that they left clues for him so that he can join them again. He keeps going from a place to another until he unveils some dark secrets about his friends and their secret society.

This is a very hard-to-read novel; I really had a hard time reading it. This is because the story is inspired by the Hungry Generation movement of west Bengal and it contains a lot of information about the Indian history. Although it was nice to know this amount of information, the novel sometimes felt like a history book. I could not understand some of the pages because I felt that they were written only for the Indians who are 100% familiar with the Indian history, Indian gods, cities, streets’ names and colleges. There was a huge amount of spelling, grammatical and punctuation mistakes and this made me almost give up on reading the novel.

The novel jumps between the past and the present. One chapter Deep is telling us about his journey and in the next chapter, he remembers his college days with his friends and lover. I thought this way of narrating the events wasn’t a successful one. I got confused while reading and I lost track of the events.

After much thought, I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars. I thought of giving it a 1 star but I admire how intellectual the author is. He has a lot of information to share and I see that he can turn this novel into a better one by paying attention to the mistakes done in this version. I recommend this novel to people who like secret societies and to teenagers especially from the Indian culture.

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the sacred darkness
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Like lily_kh87's review? Post a comment saying so!

[kimmyschemy06]

That was a very honest review. The premise sounds promising. Too bad, though, about the flaws. Good job on the review.

[lily_kh87]

Thanks for the encouragement:D

That was a very honest review. The premise sounds promising. Too bad, though, about the flaws. Good job on the review.

[Tebogo Eugene M]

Interesting review I hope Paul did find his friends and thanks for the honesty.