Review: Spy from Unaula by Alok Kumar

Introduction:

The story is set in pre-independent India spanning over a life time of a character. The story follows Ram, who born in a remote village Unaula and his adventures as he frees himself from the bondage of social prejudices and backwardness of the uneducated society there. He is inspired and supported by his brother Bhagwati right from the beginning.

What I like about the story:

The content of the story is very unique, fresh and something we don’t see in present piles of romance, mythology and crime-thriller novels. The characters are normal, real-life people and events are told in good detail (the war with Japanese, the process of selection, the atmosphere of death). Especially I like the sketched images which frequently try to bring out the scenes going on in the book. It has social messages, about how a little person from some remote village can become big.

Critical Comments:

The narration puts me off, to be honest. It is top to bottom telling in dull way. The story here is huge and if it is written with more patience it could become a 400+ pages epic, whereas solely due to the school text-book style telling, the book is merely 210 pages long. For example, it is not enough if one tells me that Ram is courageous and nervous at the same time. One can show that simply by his actions (like he elopes from his house just before 2 days of his forced-marriage but at the same times, trembles, cries sobs, wanting for water etc. when he is walking away from his home.) Or if one really wants to stick to telling, he should use similes, allegories to evoke cruelty, humor in the tone. For example, let see if the same situation can be written like : Fifty kilos of weight, he felt such pride and determination that he could alone conquer even Achilles if he tried to force him to marry that unknown girl, who definitely was not a decedent of Helen. By the way, when Bhagwati fights against Japanese in army of British, I have expected the mention of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, who was using the Japanese force to create the menace British felt.

To be Specific:

Plot:

The plot is has potential, as I have mentioned before. You’d agree with me after completing the journey of the characters in this book.

Dialogue:

It is natural and okay, but the amount of dialogue is very less in this book which is not compensated by good narration.

Characterisation:

It is good but could become livelier with more developed style of presentation. I wanted to feel the same disappointment was Ram was prevented from going to school, I wanted to feel the tension Ram felt when he was leaving his home forever.

Pacing:

Unnecessarily fast which neither creates the thrill it intends to create, nor allows the reader to feel for the characters.

Narrative:

It is mentioned in critical comments section.

Editing:

Not many typographical and grammatical errors. It’s neat.

Resolution:

Satisfying but could have been of more impact.

Overall impression:

A good read for readers searching for something new based on Indian setting which could become a far better piece of novel.

3 out of 5.

Amazon Link.

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How to receive a review (both positive and negative)

A book can get both positive and negative criticism from a reviewer. This post is about how to handle such criticisms. Now, if you search in internet, there will be plenty of posts regarding handling a negative criticism, but no one tells you about the positive one. We shall try to discuss that too in this post.

Before reading any review, remember the following:

1. The reviewer has invested 6-10 hrs of his time on your work. He has the right to voice his say.
2. If he thinks his time is wasted by reading your work, he can say bad things about your work.
3. If you get offended by that (and yes, you have also the right to get offended), you should be okay with it. Tastes vary.
4. If a reviewer tells that “this part of this novel is crap, and should have been written in this or that way”, it doesn’t establish that the reviewer himself can write the way he has expected to read.

Read the last sentence again.

Now, let us divide our discussion in 2 parts.

1. Handling Positive Criticism: If you get positive views from someone about your work, then pat yourself, you deserve it. You should use this praise to boost your confidence and work harder to bring better work. But I have seen in many cases, the recipient gets so inflated that he refuses to work hard anymore. Remember, every work will require equal and preferably more effort than you have put in your previous work. So boost your confidence with positive criticism but don’t become overconfident. If you become overconfident, points in italic in following will happen.
2.  Handling Negative Criticism: If someone bashes your book showing valid reasons, analyze if those reasons are at all valid for you. In many cases, the reviewer may not get your intentions or visions. In those cases, as you are the creator and know more about what you are doing, you may (not must) ignore those points. 

   Source – Barron’s Cartoon – by Kaamran Hafeez.

   On the other hand, if a good reviewer gives negative review and justifies his points with enough reasons and examples, preserve the review and apply the lessons learned from it. Due to overconfidence, if you respond with hostility to the review and ignore everything he has said, two things will happen: people will get a pretty good idea about your nature and you lose the chance to learn from your mistakes which you will iterate in your next works.

So, that’s it about receiving a review. This is the last post about reviewing and receiving them. Coming up: few short-stories, few discussions on books, some amazing workshops/articles/interviews by various well-known authors and a serialized post about something (I’ll reveal later). 🙂

How to write a friendly and honest review.

Reviewing a book is a tricky job because

1. The writer is eagerly waiting for the review you’ll be writing. This is true for every newbie writer. If you write a beaming review praising it, the writer will read it again and again and will feel a sheer joy. I have felt it.
2. The reader i.e. the reviewer also has invested some emotion into the book and it’d bound to reflect on the review.

The reason this is a very tricky job is that a pretty well amount of emotions is connected to it, and a review is absolutely, completely and definitely a professional business. You may have reviewed a work written by your friend and given a corny, lovely review of that. That’s okay. But once you become a well-know reviewer, you should become more professional.

So, let’s get started, shall we? It’ll be short, I promise.

Reviewing means ‘a critical appraisal of a book, play, or other work’ (ref. concise oxford dictionary) which, upon expanding tells: you read a book and you give honest opinion based on your experience of reading books and the opinion would be such that it’ll help the writer/artist ‘appraise’ his/her work.

In straight words, from your review both the writer and readers must get something of value.

Now, if the book is good, the work becomes pretty easy and everyone feels very happy. What happens if the book is not so good? Read on.

Basically, you have two options here:

1. You praise the work anyway and the author gets happy. But after reading your review when a reader buys it and gets disappointed; believe me, he’ll never ever going to read your review.
2. You point out the issues point-blankly. That’ll hurt the author brutally. He/She has spent hours creating the book and getting such a review will hurt. When other writers will read your review, many may get scared of your review and will not prefer to get their book reviewed by you. Because your review do affect the sales.

Here is what you should do:

1. Point out the good things first. And don’t forget to justify that with required quotes as it’ll increase the credibility of your review(without spoiling major plot-points). Don’t spoil a book in your review.
2. Point out what you think of it in context of the current society. It’ll help the reader understand if he really needs to read the book. (for example when I wrote the review of ‘Voices of the silent creek’; I started it like this: The book ‘Voices of the Silent Creek’ tries to bring out raw truth about women hidden behind the curtains of big houses and how knowing their situation, people choose to keep their mouth shut. The hypocrisy of people calling themselves supporter of women empowerment will strike you fiercely in this novel. A very different attempt for a debut novel and definitely deserves a round of applause.  Read the full review.)
3. While handling critical points, do it honestly but candidly. Never ever underestimate or insult the ability of the writer. That’s the greatest insult a writer can have. For example, if you see the dialogues are not good, instead of writing “The dialogues are very badly written and doesn’t interest me at all”, write, “I believe if the dialogues are constructed tautly, the effect of the story would become more lasting.” Basically, you did the same thing, but the later is more candid.

With that I am listing few quick points that may be of your help in any other review:

1. Don’t write summary and spoil the entire story.
2. Show proofs of your opinions and justify that.
3. More detailed the review, more spoilery it may become. Try to write a review that doesn’t spoil the story but gives enough glimpse into the story to justify your point.
4. Personally, I don’t like to rate books, but it’s not a sin to rate a book either. Everyone assesses everything in this world by some certain scale.
5. Don’t add blurb in your review. It makes it look less professional.
6. Try to learn something from the book because your love for books is the whole point of becoming a reviewer or a writer.
7. Don’t promise to review more books than you can read properly. This is very important. Try to review as much as possible by you, not more than that.
8. It’s preferable to restrict yourself to your favorite genres. But if you are an avid reader who eats everything that come in his way, then you go for all the genres.

So, that’s it, I suppose. Lately, I was not much active here, but now on, you’ll see regular blog posts. Thank you for reading. Do leave your comments.