Saturday 31 October 2015

#BookReview ; Life is What You Make It by Preeti Shenoy



What would you do if destiny twisted the road you took? What if it threw you to a place you did not want to go? Would you fight, would you run or would you accept? Set across two cities in India in the early eighties, 'Life is what you make it' is a gripping account of a few significant years of Ankita's life.

Ankita Sharma has the world at her feet. She is young, good-looking, smart and has tonnes of friends and boys swooning over her. College life is what every youngster dreams of and she also manages to get into a premier management school for her MBA. Six months later, she is a patient in a mental health hospital. How did Ankita get here? What were the events that led to this? Will she ever get back her life again?

Life has cruelly and coldly snatched that which meant the most to her and she must now fight to get it all back.

It is a deeply moving and inspiring account of growing up, of the power of faith and how determination and an indomitable spirit can overcome even what destiny throws at you.

A tale, at its core a love-story that makes us question our beliefs about ourselves and our concept of sanity and forces us to believe that life is truly what one makes it.

It’s clear that Preeti Shenoy wrote Life is What You Make it with a purpose to create awareness about mental health issues & profess against the taboo which is associated with it in India, for me that’s the greatest thing about it! This book isn’t just a work of fiction but has parts inspired from lives of real people. It’s a story of the struggle & self destructive feelings one has to go through which pushes them to the edge of taking their own life which can be dodged if the concerned person gets the correct help as soon as possible.


The plot is set in the early eighties, our protagonist Ankita Sharma is from a conservative family living in Cochin where her father got transferred soon after school. While Ankita’s special friend Vaibhav is away studying in IIT-D but they stay in touch through letters, they would share everything with each other through the letters which ultimately brought them even closer. But will this long distance relationship really work? On the other hand everything was going quite well for Ankita at her college St. Agnes where she even contested for an election of Arts Club Secretary & won! Since St. Agnes was a girl’s college there was no way she could meet another boy but with this new post that changed. One thing lead to another which resulted in complicated situations leading to a suicide of a boy for which Ankita tried to distance herself but secretly blamed herself.


The story is well written as to how things keep getting pressured inside the brain & when it can’t take any more of it, it leads to dangerous results & that’s why we should keep a close eye on each & every person who is close to us. This book is a good read indeed!





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