So, you’re primarily a fiction reader but someone offers you a self-help book about loving yourself. Asks you to find 30 things you love about yourself? You’d probably turn it down? But what if someone very cleverly created a fiction around that self-help book? That’s what author Radhika Sanghani has done with this witty, amusing, yet heart wrenching novel. There’s some gritty issues being dealt with here but ultimately it’s all about positivity and working through the crap that life throws at us. Nina Mistry spends the night of her 30th birthday in a prison cell! She acquires a self-help book there that is the catalyst for her self improvement. She’s a journalist, passionate about her ethnic and cultural origins and keen to share her views with the world. Doesn’t all work out quite as she thought, though! Keenly observed with a balance between the amusing and the serious with a well paced narrative populated with diverse characters. Some of these characters will make you laugh and some will make you cry. But ultimately it’s a feel good book about loving yourself, warts and all. It also has a great deal to say about family and friendships. It’s quite a deceptive work for at times you can be fooled into thinking it’s “just another“ chicklit/romcom tale but it has a greater depth in terms of demanding its reader consider some of the contemporary issues facing our world; considerations of racism, body image, social media, the place of women in the world to name a few. It’s the work of a very astute writer who is going to reach a far wider audience than would’ve been possible with “just“ a self-help book.
My thanks to team bookends for a gifted proof.
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