A Year Without Summer-Shreyan Laha

Book: A Year Without Summer

Author: Shreyan Laha

Publisher: Bigfoot Publications

What if what you are witnessing is not real? What if every time you dream, you are transported to another realm?

A Year Without Summer by Shreyan Laha is based on this concept. The book is based in the year 1816 when the Earth experienced a sudden downfall of temperatures. Kolkata had frozen to its lowest of -15 degree Celsius, and widespread diseases were common. Sharat was no exception and he had to quit his high-profile lifestyle after his parents catch the disease. At the other end, in the year 2018, Niharika lives in the best of times, in a modern society and has everything one could wish for. Neither knew that fate had something else in store for them 6 billion years into the future, on a planet Nocturne which was ravaged by compounds of an element called Barrenium. It is a tale of how stories and lives connect without respecting the boundaries of space, time and dimensions.

The storyline of A Year Without Summer by Shreyan Laha is very confusing. It feels as if the writer read up on a lot of scientific advancements and then rammed everything to create a story. The parallel storylines are incoherent and the connection between various stories is almost nil. The story flits between the conscious and the sub-conscious of Sharat and Niharika. Connecting various events of the book was quite difficult as well. Talking about the science in the Science fiction of the book, it was more than the story needed and it created a lot of confusion. The author did a good amount of research to create the plot but that actually led to a lot of plot holes and time confusions as to what was happening when and where. I felt that the climax of the story was not up to the mark and could have been done a bit better.

The story has a lot of characters and that actually went a bit on the negative side as developing so many of them was not possible in this intertwining storyline. The author has tried to divide the book into sections as to provide clarity on this but that is not very sufficient. He has created a fantasy world, but connecting or imagining the characters is quite difficult, hence the connect to the story gets missed out.

 Another point that I would like to specifically mention is that the quality of the book is not what you would expect from a book placed in this price bracket. The cover art is very blurry and does not fit into the story. The printing quality is also of a lower quality which actually reduces the reading experience.

Overall, I’ll recommend it only for people who are hard-core science fiction fans and can devote a very long time to read.

The book scores a 2.13 on 5 for me.

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