My Happily Ever After-Sanjay Sharma

Book: My Happily Ever After

Author: Sanjay Sharma

Publisher: Srishti Publications

Fate, love and life- These are the things that can neither be controlled nor influenced. Each of them will happen when they are destined to happen.

My Happily Ever After by Sanjay Sharma is the story of Keshav, a guy from a small town in Uttar Pradesh who dreams to make it big by following his passion-writing, but folds under the family pressure and secures admission in a prestigious engineering college and lands up in Delhi. A top-performer, he is a consistent topper and is excelling in his course. When he returns to Delhi for his second year, he comes across Aditi, who stumps him with her beauty and elegance. She aspires to be a singer and not an engineer. Bonding over common thoughts, and passions, things were going good until the 7^th semester when a single incident derails their lives as they know it. Aditi leaves to pursue her dreams and Keshav spirals down into a well of depression and anxiety. It is a story of deep friendships, life-altering dreams and everlasting love that can fuel you if handled properly, but at the same time burn you if you are not careful.

My Happily Ever After by Sanjay Sharma is written from Keshav’s point of view. The plot of the book is the usual boy-meets-girl story. As a stereotyped Indian Engineer, he is smitten by the girl and his love starts lacking the physical intimacy, while the girl is adamant of keeping the relationship platonic. Typical to a boy’s hostel banter, students hype their friendship and things get out of hand. The storytelling is pretty flat with the situations seeming random at times. The pace is not consistent and that causes a break in the mind while reading. There are multiple grammatical errors in the book and its needs a re edit to improve on it. The prologue of the story is technically an executive summary and serves no true purpose. The climax is good but is very hurried.

The character creation of Keshav is quite generic. Other than the fact that he comes from Gorakhpur and is tall, we get no information to create a character in our minds. Same goes for Aditi, though she is described in a bit more detail. The family backgrounds of both the characters are described nicely and thus it is easy to relate on that level. The success stories of both Aditi and Keshav is very sudden and had time been given on it, it would have helped the reader connect with them.

Overall, a good enough read, but could have been better.

The book scores a 3/5 for me.