To Be Continued by Niharika Shrivastava: Book Review

[dhwanis]

“To Be Continued…” is a coming of an age story of Nevika. The author starts the story when Nevika is born until she finishes her education. This helps the readers get a context of what she is as a person and why she behaves the way she does. As the author had a range of ages to work with, she does a wonderful job touching many issues that many people face in their life. Along with this, the author also provides solutions as to how these problems can be faced in the best way possible, or if we do not deal with it properly what could be the repercussions. Some of the issues that the author successfully touched upon were dealing with emotions, infatuations, bullying, rude teachers, lack of self-esteem, etc. The inclusions of all these made the book an interesting read.
Along with the story, another major plus of the story was its very earthy characters. While the characters were not overly complex, they had a certain charm to them. The characters were extremely relatable.
On the flip-side, the pace of the book was extremely fast and the sentence constructions were such that the reading experience became quite jarring. In many places, the author has made use of words that make no sense in that particular context. For eg: a teacher was described as “insole and baneful’ when it should have been “insolent and baneful”. There were many grammatical errors as well.
I feel the book needs to be polished a bit more in terms of language and construction.
Overall, I rate this book:
Cover:3 out of 4
Story: 3 out of 4
Grammar and Language: 1 out 4
Overall: 2 out of 4