A review by scarletohhara
I Too Had a Love Story by Ravinder Singh

2.0

More often than not, when you spot a book on the stands, you get a feeling about that book. Like how Gladwell says in Blink. More often than not, that feeling turns out to be right.
Everytime I pick up a book by an Indian author, something written in the last decade or so, I get a feeling. That nagging feeling that I might be wasting my time reading the book. That the new crop of authors do not give their due diligence to the literary quality of their story, or a novel method of story-telling. All they want is their story to be told, and if possible, get a movie made out of the book.
And I pray fervently with every book that I am proved wrong. So far, I have been right. Including this book.

For starters, I am not comfortable with the language used in this book. There is a fine line between using colloquial language in books and making it an easy , breezy read, or making the English feel like weight you have to carry in order to finish reading. Like the difference between Geet's language in Jab We Met, and whats-her-name's language in Rockstar. Both written by the same guy, Imtiaz Ali, both using colloquial language, both being worlds apart.
The inadvertent usage of adverbs, combination of certain words and placement of verbs is what makes the total difference between a world class book and a mediocre one. I am not even going into the death of good vocabulary in these books, thats a lost cause.
Usage of words like 'cute', 'angel', 'charming' etc in a love story is a tricky business. Their placement in the sentence will make or break the story, and in this case, in my opinion, it was the latter.
Well, sometimes I keep wondering if any of these new crop of authors has read writers like Marquez , Murakami or Llosa or atleast Stephenie Meyer or Sidney Sheldon and Meg Cabot, who have written some great love stories themselves. If so, did it never occur to them that they could derive their writing from these story-tellers? May be , be a little influenced?
Turns out, they aren't , which is why people like me lament about the time they spent reading such works in a dead hope that the book might be a find.
Is the goal here to get the book published at any cost, even at the cost of killing the book's potential? Is there really no zeal to write a truly good piece of work?

Before I go into the details of the book, certain disclaimers. All love stories are beautiful. Its the way you tell them that makes them either classic or am-not-even-giving-it-a-word. Well, its the difference between the books like 'We weren't Lovers like that' and 'Truly, Madly, Deeply', both written by recent Indian authors, and both falling into two ends of the spectrum.
If you ask me, this book falls in the middle of the spectrum, leaning a bit towards the lower end. There is a potential of this book being talked about as a good love story, had it not been for certain aspect, careful editing being one of them.

Have you ever listened to a friend recount his/her affair with a special someone? You smile, try to relive your own love story through their small stories, and you wish them good. You even are interested to know what goes on with them and how they are upto. At some point you will even get attached to the special someone your friend has met and feel like you know them, all through your friend's accounts of that person and the relationship.
Now, somewhere during this journey of yours into your friend's life, there might come a time where the friend might forget the subtle line between telling a good story and getting into the details. You might suddenly feel yourself party to some TMI, like what they call each other when they fight, or their cute nicknames, or how they spent their one hour together. You are suddenly wishing they never told you all this, that they just maintained the enigma behind that person, and they kept some details private.
Yes, like they say, the devil is in the details, and that's what killed this book for me. I felt that I was getting waaaay too much information about the narrator's love story with his love interest, somethings I could totally do without, some feelings which could be conveyed equally well with just careful play of words and not devilish details.
Then the aspect of the book being autobiographical - I have read some books based on real life stories, and some of them were even love stories, and trust me, if you were to make a real story into book, you'll need to edit out a lot, and bring in a lot of imagination, still sticking to the true story. Only very few real stories written the way they were have made into the classics.

The ONLY reason why I am giving this book a 2 star rating and not a 1 star, which I think it totally deserves is because I could atleast finish the book. The reading is a drone, the story is highly predictable, and the details are way too saccharine for a serious reader.
Read this book if you are the type who enjoys Bella's never-ending drone about why Edward wouldn't sit beside her, not if you are looking for a story whose quality matches that of why and how Florentino Ariza waited for Fermina Daza for seven decades. No, really.