Rainbow – the shades of love

Author: Aman Jassal
Edition language: English
Characters: Yuvi, Simran, Kulli, Satti
Published July 2014 by Teenage Publishers
ISBN: 8192932427
ISBN13: 9788192932422
Format: Paperback, 176 pages
Genre: Romance, Contemporary

Rainbow – the shades of love is the story of Yuvraj aka Yuvi, who is portrayed as a compulsive flirt with a long past of short-term relationships. Yuvi is living in a PG with a group of friends (who knows only two things–drinking and perving). Early in the story Yuvi develops feelings for a girl named Simran living in the house right in front of the PG. His friend, Sunny, son of the PG landlady, gives him her phone number. And, he starts talking to Simran through phone. On their first meeting itself Simran’s brother catches them and takes the girl away. For a while they are unable to contact, and Yuvi reaches her college to meet her. It is there Yuvi gets beaten by her cousin and then by police and spends a night in lockup. Later, Simran and Yuvi resume their phone talking and start dating on a regular basis. In the meanwhile a girl names Priyanka and Yuvi’s boss’ wife forces themselves on to Yuvi, while Yuvi is confused whether to remain faithful to his girlfriend or take advantage of the situation. In both the situations he lets his lust take over his love for Simran. Later when Yuvi decides to confront Simran with the truth of his adultery, Priyanka arrives at the same café where he was sitting with Simran. Yuvi ends up kissing Priyanka in the washroom while his girlfriend is sitting outside.

There is no uniqueness in the plot. It’s the kind of story that almost everyone has seen or heard around themselves in the real world. However, author has presented the plot in the crudest possible way. Author has depicted the male psychology and their pervert ways directly without holding anything back. And for doing the same half part of me wants to praise the author for daring it all, while other half believes that the story could have been presented in a more polished manner.

The good: One thing that I liked about the book was its resolution. It was appropriate and justified. If the story had ended in another way I am not sure how much I would have hated it.

The bad: Now, the things that I didn’t like about the book are just too many. First of all, the editor has done a terrible job. I mean it seems that it wasn’t even edited, not even self-edited. The truth is almost in the middle of the book when I thought that I cannot take the editing mistakes anymore I decided to fold the pages to take note of how much mistakes were there. I ended up folding seven pages in a row. And it’s not that a single page had a single mistake. Almost every second line needed editing/rewriting. What sort of editors and authors would let the word “THERE” appear in the book when the right word should have been “THEIR”, and not just one time but almost every time in the first seventy percent of the book. Thankfully I did start noticing some “THEIR” in the later part.

Also, while writing dialogues a comma (,), full-stop (.) or appropriate punctuation should be placed before the closing quote (“). In fact, the book contained a lot of punctuation errors.

Now, why should the editor take all the blame when it was the author who had written it all? The writing style clearly lacks experience. About the vocabulary, author has tried to use some good and big words, but it seems that he might have replaced the original word from their thesaurus brothers and sisters. Mostly these words either don’t fit, or don’t sound too well with the sentence, or just mean something else. For example, Page 101

“She was so obsessed with Mr. Gandhi, as he used to scold her for talking to other people especially males; he always kept an eye on her. Even physically he was not able to satisfy her. While narrating her misfortunes, tears started rolling down her beautiful eyes and I sat beside her to console her.”

The word obsessed here is clearly a misfit. What I can think that the author wanted to use something like—fed up, frustrated, irritated, exasperated, angry or furious. Obsessed would mean that she had very strong inclination towards the object in consideration, while the word was supposed to mean just the opposite.

That was just one example; you’d find plenty of such misfits.

Also, in the starting while Yuvi is talking with his friends over drink, girls were referred by the pronoun “it”. Either I am unable to understand what the author was trying to say, or the character had a problems with pronouns or the author couldn’t distinguish a person from a nonliving object, I am not sure. But, such kind of mistakes are not only bad grammar but also disrespectful. Let me give one instance of such usage.

Page 15: “Is she beautiful, is she hot? I mean shift it to me if you are not interested” Kulli grinned with his wide opened eyes as if we were talking about Pamela Anderson. –This sentence refers a girl with “it” and also lacks a punctuation before closing quote (which is common throughout).

Now if I start pointing out all the mistakes I’d be writing another book named Critics on Rainbow-the shades of love. So, I’d continue ahead leaving this topic behind.

Moving on to characters, the characterization was poor. Might be the author had done it deliberately but I hate the protagonist. The character was supposed to be a compulsive flirt, but I never saw a single instance where I could label him as a good flirt who could score girls like he is shown to do in the book. In both Priyanka and Mrs. Gandhi’s case, he did nothing. In fact he was more than confused, anxious and just unable to take control. And, how he was able to lure Simran just seemed like a rigged plot. No instance of good flirting there either. It was as if since the author wanted to do it, Simran fell in love with him for no good reason. But, then it might just be my opinion. Many of you might find him a potent flirt. The main thing is even when some characters are negative or with grey shades they do leave a good impact on you if written beautifully. For example, Cersei Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire is all but a grey character but people consider her a good character because she is written so well. The author could have done better with the protagonist at least. The remaining characters were alright mostly because they were out of the focus, but then poor writing made it difficult for them to survive in my head. I never found myself engrossed with the story or characters anywhere in the book, except at the end when I think I developed respect for Simran, and Smitha as well.

Overall, though I have no intentions to discourage or offend the author, I would like to say that the book lacked the basics of writing, and hope that in the next book he’d take care of writing aspect more. (Trust me I mean your good. If you want to sell your books, and not just publish them for nothing, then you need to improve a lot, and find a good editor). I would like to rate this book with two stars out of five.