Today I am going to review Shreya Prabhu Jindal’s Simply Complicated. As always, before we dive into the book review, let’s get to know a brief synopsis of the book.
About Simply Complicated
Simply Complicated is a story that revolves around the lives of five young adults, Aastha, Sameer, Rahul, Padmini and Karuna. Recently passed out of college, they have been working for a couple of years. All in an age group where life becomes confusing as they try to sort careers and personal lives, this story is majorly built around their relationships with each other. They all reside in Gurgaon and South Delhi.
My review
The books starts off with an incident where Aastha is molested in a pub, which leaves her shaken and scarred. The story that fast forwards to Aastha, Sameer, Rahul and Padmini’s present life where we see Aastha is still fighting her demons even as she tries to maintain a normal façade most of the times.
Rahul and Padmini, who are very much in love, have constant arguments as Sameer is trying to figure his next move especially, since Karuna’s parents have found the perfect match for her.
Out of all the five, Karuna and Sameer’s story seemed the most realistic. I could identify with Karuna’s problem of having overbearing parents who want their daughter to be the ‘perfect Indian girl’. Sameer came across as a good friend even if he wasn’t always the perfect boyfriend.
Aastha’s story on the other hand seemed a little too far stretched to me. Her constant interference in her friends life and adopting holier than thou attitude made me dislike her character. But on one level, my heart went out to her especially when she had one of her attacks in the middle of the night.
Rahul and Padmini seemed to be characters just out from a movie script and I was not really fond of their constant fights and then making up.
This is my opinion on individual personas but let tell you that when you intertwined all these characters together, the book definitely made an interesting read.
The group’s holiday in Goa is a major twist in the book as find that Aastha realizes that she has feelings for Sameer. Sameer on the other hand has reasons to believe that he has probably hurt Aastha and that their friendship will never be the same again.
I loved the fact that Shreya chose to give the book an open ending where one does not know whether Sameer and Aastha end up together or whether Rahul and Padmini decided to get married and live happily ever after.
The book is an easy read and a good time pass, I must day.
We remember the day seven years back when were travelling in a Mumbai local trying hard to come up withe a name for our blog when struck us; Khushboo was always called a Jack of all Trades. The name stuck (with a slight modification, of course) and Minni was born. Six years, over 100 collaboration, lakhs of readers and several awards later; our love for blogging continues to grow. We continue to write on an eclectic range of topics from the funniest autorickshaw signs that we have spotted in Mumbai to how to bathe an elephant. We are true blue Munni of all Trades and we hope to continue on this joyride with our fellow Munnies and Munnas. 