Book review: Bad Romance by Harshita Srivastava

About the book:

Life is a bitch and I’m one of its victims. I had the perfect life. I was blessed with the perfect boyfriend, a perfect best friend, the perfect set of girlfriends and perfect choice of career. There were some loopholes but then they went beyond my perspective. Overall, I had the kind of life people would ideally like to have but happy times aren’t meant to last forever.

Sometimes we feel that we have figured life but that’s something that is never going to happen. You know why? It’s because it has this habit of kicking us right in the middle of ecstasy. No wonder, it did the same with me.

This is my story, my story of that exploration within, my feelings, my emotions, my thought process, my priorities, my conflicts and my journey into the temptation of love, lust, lies and betrayals. This is the story of Kritika and a man who gave her life another dimension, Tanishq. This is a story of the complexities of relationships and the trap that a simple idea of sensuality, pleasure and euphoria can put you into. This is a story for everyone who has loved, lost and fought for survival and love, together.

About the Author:

A full-time writer, Harshita Srivastava is the author of 'One In A Million' that got published by Mahaveer Publishers in April 2013 in her final year of Mechanical Engineering at G.L.Bajaj Institute of Technology and Management, Noida. She is an avid reader and a prolific blogger. She loves reading classics and is a diehard Mills and Boons fan. She loves to see happiness around her so she’ll always be found motivating people or making them smile. Apart from writing, she loves travelling, reading, listening to music and spending time with friends and family. She is currently working on her second novel 'Bad Romance'.

My Review:

The tagline "Love, Lies and Betrayal" aptly sums up the themes around which the novel revolves. It is the story of any girl-next-door. Life in a hostel, a string of relationships, et al form the core of the plot.
The best part of the novel is that it comes in layers: First, it manifests itself as a fairy tale romance, then it resurfaces as a story of two people oscillating between infatuation and superficial love (peppered with the inevitable love triangle) and finally takes a plunge when it delves into the darker human emotions, harsh living realities, and gory human frailties. It soon undergoes a metamorphosis into a saga of shattering human fallacies and an encounter with the ugly truth. And the truth is: Stories about real relationships flummox and fluster you beyond measure, that reasoning between the right and wrong becomes almost difficult. The part of novel which has an interplay of these themes is the best part.
I managed to read it and finish in a couple of hours, so it can become a good one-night-read.
The downside is that for one, there has been a lot of scope to do footwork. For instance, the character sketches could have been worked upon, because a book can get under the skin of a reader only through the characters. Also, a reader is interested in knowing the personality of characters: what makes them them. Same goes with the expression and description of critical and crucial incidents. It is for the same reason that we get abrupt beginnings and endings. Also, editing finesse has been conspicuous by its absence.
Overall, it is a kinda 3.5/5. A .5 extra for the potential of the storyline.

Best Lines:

We don't stop loving people. People die but does our love for them depreciate? It's just that we get used to being without them.

My Judgement:

A raw, bare and verbatim depiction of contemporary relationships is how this novel can be best described.

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