Title: Lemon Girl
Authoress: Jyoti Arora
Stories that touch your heart and make you feel the presence of characters are hard to find. ”Lemon Girl”, by Jyoti Arora is one such book that narrates the story of Arsh and Nirvi, in a different and appealing manner. The story voices the pain of victim of rape and how erroneously society behaves with the victim not the doer. This very message to the society along with a lovely story makes it a worth read.
As the back cover says:
“‘It’s all your fault.’
Mere words these are.
But words can possess a shadow invincible enough to rob even a soul of its eternity.”
In a society that finds it easier to mark sins of a victim than the culprit, Nirvi is a young girl punishing herself for the faults she did not do and avenging her hurts by defeating her own truth.
She is scared of her future, and ashamed of her past. She is failing herself, and knows it. She has had a long line of boyfriends, and hated them all. She detests the guy she is living with, runs away from the one she loves, and seduces the one who can never love her.
When Arsh first sees Nirvi, she’s a free and frank girl in whose eyes sparkle the lemony zest of life. The next time he sees her, she is a voiceless doll draped in clothes that cover her body less and shroud her soul more. And Arsh can’t rest till he finds out what made Nirvi give up her own real self.
Nirvi knows she is dragging herself on a path from which there can be no recovery. Can her spirit survive the treacherous downfall? Or is the pull of fear and push of desperation just too strong to withstand for a girl who believes she has “nowhere else to go” but down.
“When it’s time for you to fall in love, even a lemon can become the cause of it,” says Arsh.
But can love survive, when even the self-love dies?
Can love survive when respect is no more?
Does true love have the power to revive a dying soul?
Find out in the pages of this brilliantly woven, intense, heart-warming and thought-provoking saga of RISING IN LOVE…”
From the title of the book, I couldn’t guess something peculiar about the story, though the blurb at the back cover very clearly outlines the story and the reader would get a needed hint as to go through it or not. Talking about the cover design of the book, it looks nice but the cover could depict more of the story.
In the beginning, the mystery of Nirvi’s life is kept at pause and that makes you discover and unfolds the mystery and as soon as you discovers it, you would find yourself all set to reach to the end. The narration of the story goes in juxtaposing the part of Nirvi’s and Arsh’s feelings, which at some places, creates confusion. If a single character would narrate it then I think it would go more smoothly.
The storyline of the book is very nice, although nothing so out of the box story it is, but the reader would find a touch of reality in it and as the reader progress towards the end, he/she could completely relate to it. The story has limited number of characters which makes the story go at ease creating no amount of confusion in reader’s mind. There’s a proper flow provided to the story which makes reader keep on turning the pages.
A matured and fluid writing style is used to coat the story. Only relevant incidents are narrated and the best thing about the book is it is not unnecessarily stretched, the authoress very well knows what to narrate and what not to and when to give a full-stop.
Precisely, I would call it worth-a read. Flavours are there, a good story is there and presence of good narration style makes it worth a read.
Rating : 4.4/5
Reviewer: Shweta Kesari