Wednesday 4 February 2015

Review of 'Scarred for life, healed forever' by 'Ashwati Menon'

Title: Scarred For Life, Healed Forever
Author: Ashwati Menon
Publisher: Gargi Publishers
Page Count: 126
My Rating: 3/5


Blurb: What are these strange visions? What is wrong in her head? Why does she get strange feelings before incidents happen?

Nishtha Vaidya is a survivor of a terrible natural calamity. Not only does she live on with survivor's guilt, her mind is still there, on the ill-fated day and she could never come out of it. Just when things are beginning to settle slowly in the safe and cozy life in a vibrant lifestyle of Gujarat - Nishtha is getting strange visions and headaches. Life is taking her back two years in time and she finds she is running around the state, saving different and unknown lives from mortal peril.

Will Nishtha get answers to these mind boggling questions? Will Nishtha be able to pay tribute to her friends whom she lost? Has her untold love story got anything to do with it at all? Will Nishtha Ever unburden herself?


Verdict: ‘Scarred for life, Healed Forever’ is the first book by Ashwati Menon. This is an unusual story with an equally unusual ending.

The first thing that catches the eye of the author is the cover, which is quite efficiently designed. The illusion image of a girl on the front will raise questions among the readers. But I think the cover doesn't go with the story and could have been designed in a different way. The blurb was good and gives a good outline of the story. Overall the first impression was good but doesn't say much about the content.

This story is of a Nishtha Vaidya, a girl from Ahmedabad, fighting with her super natural powers. Nishtha had a happy and caring family and a good paying job thanks to her academic skills. After going to Australia for the Foreign Student Exchange Programme, she faced Tsunami and became the only Indian to survive. That incident changed everything in her life. She lost her friends and the love of her life. Nishtha realized that she had got some super natural power and sometimes can see what is going to happen next. How she manages to cope up with this power and uses it to save lives? How these visions made her life tough? And how she came out of this trauma? That is the book all about.

The author has chosen a different story for her debut novel which is commendable but the execution is not up to the mark. The narrating style was simple and was unable to keep the reader engaged. There are scenes which could have been described in a better way. The grammatical errors were dropping the speed of the book.

The characterization was good. Almost every characters has a different role to play in the story. There is one character in the story which I think could have been ignored by the author that is of Dnyaneshwar uncle. One thing where the author needs to work is on the description of the characters. Apart from the main protagonist and the few main characters all most all characters had lacked the lime light.

The author had tried to pen down something different than the regular but the framing of the plot could have been better. I like those frequent jumping of the scenes from present to past and the end. The author has the capability of describing scenes and could do a way lot better than this. Overall a nice brave attempt by a new author.


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