The Boy Who Loved: Book Review

The very first reason to buy this book was to learn about the fascination, admiration and addiction that young people have for a contemporary novel. Durjoy Dutta is one of the well-known names (among youth) in India, I couldn't keep myself from reading. 

Never in my wildest imagination did I ever think that such a run-of-the-mill book can become one of the bestsellers and finds a decent rating on Goodreads.

How can you like, let alone love, a book if the story starts with the hero planning on to attempt suicide for no apparent reason and ends with, more or less, the same way. Like what? The main thing that kept me going through the book was the hope of being treated by an unexpected spectacular climax.

The intention of the author was good. He tries to touch onto serious issues - suicide, depression, harassment, religion, etc. but fails miserably in putting it out through good fiction. But fiction or novel-writing is much more than the intention of the author. I take not an offence to the depressed characters out, but such a lousy storyline along with cardboard characters fetched all but frequent sighs of pity from me.

Being depressed is one issue but forcing the readers to take the flat-out characters as depressed is a totally different thing. Throughout the storyline, not once did I feel pity for the main character Raghu or Brahmi, the girl Raghu loves. You can't tell me about character's misery. You have to show me that.

The repeated PSs used in the book looks very pathetic. It just seemed too desperate an attempt by the writer to make his readers believe that Raghu is really "depressed."

It seems easy to write about misery and depression but in reality, it is as difficult a job. Even though the book isn't entirely based on the theme of depression, the storylines remain on depression.

The imbalanced usage of details in the book is another downside of the book. Places/ situations where readers need explanations were left unexplained; while the ones that didn't need any explanation, were given the undeserved importance.

Now let me talk about writing style.  Boy,  the writing skill author blew me apart! Very medicore is the word. Other than some technical errors, dialogues were written so unnaturally. I doubt the credibility of the author. 

As an ending antedate- a fiction too far-fetched cannot be called a good fiction.

This doesn't seem like his work- I'm saying this because I had read his "Of Course I Love You" months back and all I remember is I did find it good. 

Thanks to my curiosity that made me read this book. I don't regret my time reading it (for one, it did not take much) because going without reading it would have left me with a thought of depriving myself of a read. I learned a lot though.