Love is Vodka A Shot Ain't Enough by Amit Shankar

I was sure that this book wasn’t my cup of tea and initially had no intention of picking it up. Then one of my blogger friends referred it to ma saying that I should give it a try. She felt that I would like it. ‘And if not… I will sponsor your next read – a book of your choice!’, she said. Ah well! Who can resist the chance of getting a free book out in exchange of couple of hours of reading? So, I picked it up when I got a review request and well, she was right. It is indeed something that I did like.

The blurb of the story that’s printed on the back cover and on the online websites, doesn’t really do justice to the story. It somewhat makes us think that the story is nothing but yet another shallow love story that seem to have flooded the Indian market in the last couple of years. Oh don’t get me wrong… Yes, the bottom line is that this is a love story, but it isn’t just another love story and actually has something substantial to offer to its readers.

Moon, our protagonist, starts off as just another girl of our generation, with dreams and hopes of her own. She, like most of us girls, is in search of her white knight and in the meantime she falls in and out of love all the time. She is strong and rebellious and doesn’t always conform to the society’s norms. The only constant in her life is her mother, a famous TV News Anchor. The mother-daughter dynamics is another thing that was interesting to read. As a single and successful career oriented mother, Payal is not able to give as much time to her daughter. And Moon’s rebellious nature doesn’t really help smooth things between them. Yet the love between the two is very clear.

What Moon’s story really points out to us is that the in search of that one true love, we do things that we normally wouldn’t. In this process, we change ourselves often to a length that even we cannot recognise ourselves. The important thing here is to be true to one’s nature and be comfortable in our own skin. We need to accept ourselves as who we truly are and unless we can love ourselves, how can we expect someone else to fall for us? It is something that I have firmly believed in for a long time now, and the author has finally managed to bring that one simple fact out in the open. The novel also questions, the boundaries that set the ‘acceptable’ definition of the word ‘Love’.

Overall, this was an interesting journey to take and I did enjoy watching Moon mature over the pages. Yes, people even if you are like me and do not put much by the love stories that’s all in rage these days, give this one a read for a heart-warming climax.