There are not many adjectives that come to mind when I think of Rohit Gore’s “The Guardian Angels”, now that I have finished reading it. It follows two star struck lovers through various stages of their lives and Gore gets to stereotype them as often as he can in the 328 page length of this “epic and tumultuous love story”.

Aditya Mehta, the son of a billionaire, cricket enthusiast and the prince of Mehta Group and Radha Deodar, a Socialist with Huntington’s disease are each other’s Guardian Angels from the time they meet when they were 12. Divided into four books, this story is about their relationship in their pre-teens, teens, twenties and thirties. Throughout their journey, they struggle to name or define the exact nature of their relationship, but could always be counted upon in need. As an idea, this sounds mildly interesting but the writing is devoid of any style or imagination and the story resorts to conveniences at the first drop of hat making it difficult to invest our time with any of the protagonists, emotionally or otherwise.

In his teens, Aditya Mehta, apparently, was a great cricket player and was compared to the greatest batsman of our time, which is fine and dandy since there were 10,456 “Next Tendulkar”s ever since he started his career and probably there were a couple of them being born as I’m typing this. But Rohit goes a step ahead and claims that Aditya could have even been a better player than The Man himself. Even if we ignore the obvious blasphemy, this claim still is rather a tall one and one that potentially makes it impossible to take the character or the writer seriously. However, it does serve as a comment on how our generation’s fixation with success and how it views it through a rose tinted glass while ignoring the efforts that go into making a man successful.

 The only redeeming feature in this predictable novel is that it is a light and breezy read and does not demand too much time with a dictionary. It seems long, drawn out and a touch repetitive but it never bores you with unnecessary or poorly written descriptions of innocuous places or things. Each phase in the characters’ lives was introduced with a brilliant quote and the first one by Stephen King “If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you” was the one I liked a lot and it is easily the best thing about the book.

I’m a huge fan of printed word and always respect the time and the enthusiasm of an author in bringing us a work of art, no matter how the content is, since I admire the discipline and appreciate the efforts that go into it. Rohit Gore scores very high on all these counts in writing this rather ambitious novel, but, the quality of writing is several notches below what can be expected from a writer of 4 books.

Bottom-line: If you do not burden it with your expectations, you will be rewarded with 5-6 hours of nothingness.
This Review was written as a part of  Reviewers Programme on The Tales Pensieve.