Review: Little LuckNow

By Nitya Prakash. Grade: B

They say “Rain is the season of love and when it rains, love flows in the air”.

This monsoon VoB sent me an author signed ARC of ‘Little LuckNow’ by bestselling author Nitya Prakash.  Mr. Prakash has two bestseller in his account viz ‘Dear, I hate You’ and ‘In the name of Love,R.I.P’.

Can a kid fall in love and actually mean it?

Anyone can be in love, it has nothing to do with your age.

It’s a feeling like sad and happy but love is just harder to find, when you love someone that’s it you don’t wait until you are an adult, you simply love them.

Love is lot like living for kids.

Anyone can fall in Love. Right?

But, Can a kid die for his love and actually mean it?

We talk of the cover first.  On the book jacket of A Little LuckNow is the image of a cute little child. The idea is quite innovative and thus it looks very inviting. The cover is designed by Mr. Prakash himself and the image is credited is to the famous photographer Lauren Fitzgerald. However, the blurb clearly gives an idea of the plot, that is, a love story of a child, and most probably a sad one.

The prologue is  beautifully written and gives a clear view of the story coming ahead. The only thing that irked me was that it had too small a font and that a quote of Nicholas Stone  had been credited to Oscar Wilde.

It starts with a date, 26 January, 2001, the date when a massive earthquake rocked Gujarat. The same time we are introduced to our protag Kapil Oberoi. In his teens, Kapil is an eighth grader. The first thought in my head was that ‘I was in eighth grade too when it happened’ followed rapidly by, ‘I am reading the love story of a fourteen-year-old!’. But as the abstract said “Anyone can be in love, it has nothing to do with your age.”

Mr. Prakash describes how Kapil lived his school days, and how he started feeling something indescribable and mysterious about a girl called Prerna, his classmate. The backdrop is that of Lucknow, but there is almost nothing about the city, because since all the characters are from the same school, every event has taken place within its premises.

The book was a breezy read. It is on the lighter side in terms of the number of pages, too. With a total number of pages is 155 and the story merely contained in the 130 pages, it can very well be finished within a few hours.

I must say that Mr. Prakash has great storytelling capabilities, because while reading it, he made me feel as if I was a part of the story. Sometimes as Kapil or sometimes as a classmate, who was observing everything. The understanding of child psychology has taken the story a little above than ‘just another teenage love story’.

There is a chapter that described rain and the feelings associated to it. It’s my favorite chapter because every single emotion was beautifully described. The chapters are reasonably written, and without many twists and turns they proceed swiftly.

One unusual thing I noticed in Little LuckNow was that the chapter headings are not in the same margin, i.e., a few chapters start a little above the half page mark, while some start below it. It looked like a page extension policy.

There is one big thing that I really want to point out. Whenever we read any books by Indian authors, we presume that there will be many grammatical and spelling mistakes and with time, immunity against such mistakes has been developed in many readers. A few spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are alright, but if you read a word that means something entirely different, completely out of context, what will your reaction be?

Before I’d picked the book up, I had made a mental note to not look for spelling mistakes on my first read. I have read Mr. Prakash’s previous work, In the name of Love, R.I.P. It was well edited and apart from a few errors, nothing much stood out. Unfortunately, I had to ignore the note after I spotted one right in the blurb – a YOUR instead of You Are. Having a spelling mistake on cover page is absolutely criminal. Especially after the criticism faced by many Indian Publishers for giving no heed to editing, this absolute carelessness on the Publisher’s part. Simple words such as ‘Plane’ and ’Diary’ are written as ‘plain’ and ‘dairy’ respectively, and these two words are from the first chapter only. I found no chapter without any spelling or grammatical mistake. Really strange, especially when you know that the author wouldn’t make such disastrous errors, having read other novels by him.

To conclude, I would say that Mr. Prakash has written a beautiful and innocent love story from a child’s perspective and undoubtedly kept it simple, sweet and clean. Though there are no twists and turn in the story, the climax more than made up for that. It’s intense and  really sad.

Better editing would have made the read more captivating. If you want to read a decent young adult fiction, Little LuckNow is for you, but if you find the love story of a fourteen-year-old impossible to happen, then it will only upset you.

I wish Mr. Prakash Good Luck, for his upcoming book Maya, and suggest to him to look into editing more personally now onwards.