Book Review: ‘Luv.Net’ by Bharti Mohan

My Rating**

‘Luv.Net’ by Bharti Mohan is a romantic tale of two youngsters. The story is set in the early era of internet chatting when messengers like ‘Yahoo’ were popular amongst the people. The story revolves around a boy and a girl who got acquainted with each other in a chat room on internet. While their chat starts with some dirty and foolish talks, they gradually come to know each other better and become good friends. Then there are some twists and turns, and finally there is a happy ending. The book is basically targeted at the teenage groups.

To be frank, this book failed to leave any sort of impressions on me and I have nothing good to say about this book. The story, as a whole, is flat. A large part of the book is in the form of conversation between two main protagonists of this novel (chatting between two people on internet). This conversational structure has neither helped in developing the characters nor in building the main plot of the story. Consequently readers fail to connect with the characters. In a book of such a length as this is, it is important to develop characters with proper care. For me, the book could have been more effective if written in simple narrative style. A simple narrative style would have allowed the author to expand the horizons of the plot in a much better manner. Additionally, such a narration would have enabled the author to generate certain amount of emotion or feelings in the storyline, which is completely lacking in this book. You cannot enjoy the book if you neither feel the pain of the characters nor feel joyous in their happiness. Can you?

In the book, we also find discussion on serious topics like environment cleanliness, women’s empowerment, female foeticide, cast system, and reservation based on cast system. The author has tried his best to intertwine these topics in the main storyline carefully. The inclusion of these sensitive issues certainly does not meddle with the flow of the story.  In fact, by including these, the author made an attempt to show main characters of the book somehow noble in appearance. While this is a good effort from author’s side, the addition of such serious issues in the main plot did not make characters noble at all. On the other hand, it seems that issues like these have been included as space filler or to increase the number of pages in the book. The seriousness of these issues somehow keeps buried in the pages and does not shake the thinking cap of the readers.

So, what else has been left? Nothing! There is nothing worth in this book to talk about. This book is a debut novel by the author. And, therefore, I do not want to keep criticizing the book. While the book under review may attract some young readers, I have my doubts on that. Let’s hope, Bharti Mohan’s second novel will be much better than this.

Will I recommend this book to anybody? No!

Note: I received my copy of ‘Luv.Net’ free from the author via Goodreads’ First Reads program.