My Beautiful Memories-Irshad Thalakala

Book: My Beautiful Memories
Author: Irshad Thalakala
Publisher: Invincible Publishers

Do you think about your school days fondly?

My Beautiful Memories by Irshad Thalakala is the story of Anwar who had a wonderful childhood even though his family struggled because of financial issues. He enjoyed his school life and had many good friends. But as he grew older the pressure to succeed mounted on him. To get his family out of financial crunch, he lost touch with most of his childhood friends. Many years later, to help one of his close friends to overcome depression, Anwar and his best friend organized a reunion back in their old school. It was an important day for Anwar too. To understand its importance, you need to know about Anwar and his life. This novel takes you through Anwar's life. His happiness, his struggles, his wishes, his regrets and so on.

The book is crafted in an interesting manner as the primary character goes back in time and recollects his journey through the years and the struggle that the family undergoes to help Anwar get where he is today. This is a story of how trials make a man and how situations shape the person that he becomes. The concept of the book is quite wonderfully planned and the idea of recollecting memories is an interesting one, but personally, I felt that the tone is quite flat and the entire story is told on the same level, without much change in the pitch or feeling. There are times when the emotions do come into play, but that moments are quite rare. Secondly, the viewpoints feel eerily singular and while there are a couple of chapters from other perspectives, it is too little too late. The climax is nicely done and closes the stories of all the characters we meet.

Coming to the characters, Irshad has introduced multiple characters in this story and the paths of each of them cross Anwar’s story at some point or the other. From his childhood to his marriage, we see various people and the story moves through their interactions and how Anwar reacts to each one of them. I liked how Irshad has picked his characters, almost real-life and the descriptions are very well done, however the conflicts are either long drawn, or fragmented which causes a loss of relatability for a few of them.

Overall, a well-planned story, but the execution and the storytelling could have been polished a bit with a bit more of conflict and drama introduced to add more flesh to the characters and the plot. The book scores a 3.75/5 for me.

A copy of the book was provided to me in exchange for an honest review.

Get a copy of the book on Amazon India here.