UNTIL LOVE SETS US APART. (Book Review)

NAME: Until Love Sets Us Apart, to love with love.
AUTHOR: Aditya Nighhot
PUBLISHER: Finger Print
GENRE: Romance
PAGES: 230
RATE: 3.5/5
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This is a beautiful, heart-warming college romance story of a very regular young couple, Rohit and Aisha, and their friends, Alok, Kriti and Neha, who happen to be MBBS students, that takes a dark turn that you would wish a love story never takes. The book starts with a very interesting crime sequence that instantly hooks you to the story and the narrative is quite impressive for this being the writer's debut commercial book.

I have never been a fan of Romance novels especially from Indian authors, but this is a book I did enjoy and would like to recommend to new readers as well as those who prefer romances, not just because it is well written and has a good story, but also because it comes with a very important message and highlights a major social issue in India.
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Also, another point I appreciated about the writing is that the conversations between the inspector and ACP were mostly happening in Marathi and then translated into English, which made them much more real.(It really irritates me to read the dialogues between even two illiterate people happening in fluent English in most novels!).

Talking about the story,  Rohit is a good looking, happy-go-lucky and commitment-phobic boy who is aimless and distracted, whereas Aisha is a focused,  intelligent and very beautiful girl, which makes them quite opposite to each other. This could have been a cheesy and cliched love story about opposites attracting and Bollywood-style love developing between the two, but what makes it different and thought provoking is the tragedy which befalls this almost perfect romance, which wrecks not only their's but the worlds of all the people around them. Honestly, I was expecting this incident to happen but what I appreciated is the way the writer handled the situation and did not make it unbelievable or the solution too simple. Even though I had anticipated it, I was still extremely moved and felt the pain of the characters with them.
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SPOILERS! (If you are interested in the story so far, I suggest you read the book first and then come back to this section of the review.)
So a beautiful and genuine relationship develops between Aisha and Rohit, and they love each other so much that even Rohit, who feared being committed, changed completely and the two were soon to be married . They brought out the best in each other. All the friends were enjoying their college life to the full and even Alok and Kriti fell in love with each other. At the end of five years of their medical course, when it seemed like nothing could go wrong, Aisha and Neha were out for a girls' night at a club, Aisha was raped and assaulted by three men very gruesomely and with such brutality that it led to her death, Neha tried her best to fight them and save her but of course was overpowered by them and would have met the same fate if people had not gathered on time. Aisha called Rohit for help which made him and Alok come to the club as soon as possible but they were too late, on seeing them the rapists stabbed Aisha before running away and she soon died. From Neha they found out that one of the rapists was Ajay, the son of a very powerful and rich man, and they filed a case against him. Cutting it short, the court proceedings took place and the three criminals got away by bribing the witnesses and threatening Neha of an acid attack if she gave a statement against them. This made Rohit go mad with revenge, and as the writer said, everything is fair in love and war, and this was love with war! So taking matters into his own hand, he decides to murder the three monsters himself in the same way that they had tortured and killed Aisha, and the investigation of these murders is how the book starts. The writer also made sure that he cleared the fact that he didn't approve of the way Rohit had taken justice into his own hands and was merely telling a story.
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Well to conclude, I loved the way the writer presented the book without making it only a cheesy love story and the fact that it is somewhat based on real events makes it disturbing as well as a better experience. It made me think about and question our justice system and laws, as I have after every rape case in the news that takes more than 5 years to get the guilty a deserved punishment. Although India has changed and enforced strict laws against rapes, the process of execution has a long way to go.

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HAPPY READING!