A Price to Love - Smita Das Jain - ★★.½

AUTHOR: Smita Das Jain

GENRE: Contemporary Romantic Drama.

RATING: 2.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A brave choice of protagonist for this genre, as the leading lady pretty much drives the show in a ruthless and selfish way. The writing style, however, wasn’t a match to my reading preferences, and the somewhat clichéd approach in certain plot elements also reduced my enjoyment. A decent book, but I wanted more.

Story Synopsis:

2018. Gurugram, India. Sonia seems to have everything going right for her. A management grad from India’s best institution, twenty-seven year old Sonia works in a job she is passionate about, and married to her classmate from IIM-A. Her reporting heads idolise her, and her assistants are also in awe of her. The glitch in this perfect world is that her husband Sameep isn’t happy with the way Sonia seems to be working 24x7, even at the cost of their personal time together. Sonia’s decisions are dominated not just by her ambitions but also by her past. How long can Sonia continue to surge ahead, and how many people will she stomp upon on her quest for corporate dominance?

The story comes to us in a limited third person perspective mainly of Sonia, and covers various timelines.

Bookish Yays:

✔ It is quite unusual for an Indian novel to portray a woman so unapologetic about her ambitions and conniving in her approach. While I simply couldn’t bring myself to like Sonia for her personal and professional behaviour, I appreciate the author’s approach towards portraying her female mc as a modern go-getter.

✔ The multi-timeline approach works well for the story, as it reveals to us only in bits and pieces what shaped Sonia’s personality in the contemporary timeline.

✔ The author herself is a management grad with many years of corporate experience, and her writing clearly puts her knowledge to use. I loved seeing the portrayal of the corporate world in this book. The protagonists are not limited to vague office tasks. Rather, their approach to strategic development, product improvement, skill sharing across departments, and other such routine top-management tasks is realistic.

✔ The best part of the writing for me was the myriad diary entries that reveal Sonia’s inner demons battling it out in her mind. These were brilliant!

Bookish Nays:

❌ Three feedback points related to dialogues & conversations:

       🚩 This is a book that is driven ahead primarily by conversations. While there are some chapters where the scenes are accompanied by descriptions, most of the plot moves only through the characters’ interactions. The scenes at IIM-A, for example, are primarily set in places where the lead characters can speak with each other, such as on badminton courts and dorms instead of in classrooms. Inner monologues are also conspicuous by their absence for most of the book. I’ve realised lately that a conversation-driven storytelling style hardly ever works for me.

       🚩 The spoken dialogues in the book feel unnatural at times. They are a bit ‘filmy’ in style, and sometimes contain lines that don’t make sense in the context of the scene or the characters speaking them. Dialogues cannot be used as a way of explaining things to readers.

       🚩 A couple of Hindi dialogues in the book have no translation. This won’t work for those who don’t know the language. As there aren’t too many occurrences of Hindi conversations, it would have been better to keep the content entirely in English. There are also some ‘Indianisms’ such as “propose her” and “timepass”. The latter is acceptable, but the former usage always makes me cringe!

❌ I cannot like plots that allow infidelity to be brushed aside without any apology or regret. There’s no justification for cheating in a relationship, no matter what your mental health.

❌ The male characters are highly stereotypical and have limited roles to play. Most of them—Sonia’s husband Sameep, Sonia’s boss Rishabh, her assistant Mehul—seem to be fascinated by her looks and most of the times, willing to overlook all her flaws. Rishabh and Mehul also remark about Sonia’s looks while interacting with her in office, which was very creepy. (What was more vexing was Sonia’s delight at the compliments rather than being irritated for getting appreciation for her looks than her brains. This can be partially attributed to her backstory but it was still disappointing.)

❌ Age is depicted quite oddly in the novel. Rishabh is portrayed as feeling guilty about or tired because of his age, as if he is much older than forty-three. A promotional image even says about his character, "Should he listen to his heart and forget his age?" Were it not for a singular reference to his actual age at the start, I would have assumed him to be in his late fifties at the very least considering the way he was written. How is forty-three old!?! Sonia herself talks of being much older than Mehul though the age gap between them is barely four years.

❌ The number of active characters in the book is very limited, making it feel more like a play than a novel. (The sheer number of conversation-dominated scenes heighten this feeling.) The entire story comes only through 5-6 characters, with a couple other characters mentioned in the background but not having a direct role in the plot. This creates monotony after a while.

❌ I got the feeling that the author wants us to either sympathise or empathise with Sonia for being a career-oriented woman struggling to make time for her personal life. But as I wrote earlier, Sonia is quite selfish and opinionated, and doesn’t think twice about lying or manipulating others to get her own way. Her unwillingness to compromise on her ambitions would have been easier to accept had she had greater integrity. I saw Sonia only as a flawed character and not as a role model for modern Indian women. (I actually liked Sameep better and felt that Sonia didn’t deserve him at all.)

❌ Sonia’s backstory should have been more developed in order to make us understand her better. The revelation of the traumatic details feel quite rushed. Even the mental health issues come out only vaguely.

Basically, the writing style, the entitled female lead character, and the flat portrayal of the male characters are what killed this book for me. Had I been more open to conversation-driven writing, I might still have liked it a little better. That said, I appreciate the attempt to depict a modern character who lives life on her own terms. That’s a plus, but it was not enough for me. Then again, every reader is different, so if you do pick the book, I hope you like it better.

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