Author: Indrajit Garai
Genre: Adult, Fiction, Short Stories
Pages:218
Published: August 25, 2016
Publisher: Self-Published
Price: £6.85 (Paperback from Amazon)
£4.59 (Kindle Edition)
Series: Standalone
Source: Given in exchange of an honest review
Triggers (in book, review is safe): Suicide, Self Harm, Gore (related to the self harm), talk of drug use, Death
About the book (Taken from the blurb):
In this collection, meet:
Guillaume, who gives up everything to protect his child; young Mathew, who stakes his life to save his home; and, François, who makes the biggest sacrifice to rescue his grandson.
My review:
I'm going to review this book a bit differently because it's a collection of stories, and I've never reviewed one of those before. So I'm going to review each story on its own, then go to an overall review at the end. That way, you only have to read the bits you are interested in. There's only three stories though, so I promise it won't take too long.
Short Story 1: The Move
I feel this collection started with the worst. If has a pretty niche market as I don't really understand, or care much about, the problems facing milk farmers in France. I'm sure some people do, and understand the complexities of it, but I'm definitely not one of those people.
The story was a little too neat. One thing happened, then another, then another, so there wasn't any room for down time, which made everything very forced and a little bit too convenient. It also made character development pretty limited. I forgot about each character almost as soon as I finished reading the story, which obviously isn't wonderful.
So, in short, I didn't really like this one. I couldn't relate to it in any way and most of Guillaume's problems went straight over my head.
Short Story 2: The Listener
This short story is considerably better than the first. Much more relatable, much more developed, much more worth the reading time.
As I am a bit of a nature freak myself, I could completely understand Mathew's love for his tree. It was super cute! I also love the way Garai describes nature, particularly the woodland creatures in Mathew's tree. I could tell that Garai cares about preserving woods as much as I do, which is completely awesome.
However, some scenes in the story were a little out of place, like the whole bit with the child snatcher - was it really needed? After the scene nothing came of it, and it was never mentioned again. It was like it was there as a filler, but why? It's a short story, it can be as short as you want, and can definitely be shorter than 67 pages! Filler is definitely not necessary, and it broke the story up in a really weird place.
But, other than that, it wasn't too bad!
Short Story 3: The Sacrifice
They undoubtedly saved the best for last! The characters are more relatable and you genuinely feel bad for the characters when things go wrong.
And sheesh, a lot goes wrong.
The only annoying thing is that the ending is incredibly, and I mean incredibly, rushed. One minute things were going ok, and then I turned the page and things were very, very not ok, then the book ended. Just like that. I'd spent the last 65 pages getting to know the characters, and in the last 10 pages it didn't matter anyway, pretty much. I have so many questions about the end of the book, which could have been easily solved in an extra 10 pages. Then the ending could have been spread out a bit more, and it wouldn't have been so unnecessarily obscure. But, Garai confined himself to around 70 pages, which resulted in filler in the last story and extreme rushing in this one.
That's what annoyed me so much, the major problems with the storylines could be easily solved by writing a few extra, or fewer pages. Bleh.
Overall:
After a very brief analysis of the stories, I want to talk about the book as a whole. Can you remember when your high school English teacher used to tell you to only use a few short sentences, so they don't lose effect? Maybe it was just me because I think short sentences are EVERYTHING! But I see what they mean now. There's 10 short sentences just on the first page, out of 16 sentences. They. Are. Everywhere. And hey, I love a short sentence, but it makes the text extremely limiting and very simplistic. But, in all fairness, I don't think English is this authors first language. Which makes the simplistic nature understandable.
The other thing is the authors often odd choice of words, especially when writing in a child's perspective. It's quite hard to explain, but some of the words are overly formal, or very unchildlike, or misused in the context. For example, a phone rings 'frantically', and using 'humane' to describe someone instead of pretty much any other word with the same meaning. The language used was incredibly stand-off-ish.
I just want to put this out there, I'm not trying to be mean, or put a new author down, or nit-pick, I'm trying to give some constructive criticism. This is Garai's first work of fiction, so I obviously want to help home improve! So this book should, by no means, be written off, I just feel it needs a bit of work! I definitely hope Garai continues to write in the future and thank you for letting me review your book!
Contact me! theintrovertswonderland@gmail.com
Hm, I don't read much short stories so I'll give this a pass but I do hope others will enjoy it.
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