My Rating - 1 out of 5 stars
Publisher - Evincepub PublishingGenre - Autobiography
Publishing year - 2021
Language - English
ISBN - 978-93-5446-097-5
Pages - 112
Book Review -
One of my favorite genres is autobiographies; I'm a sucker for it. I read so many of them and learned a lot from other people's experiences. A good memoir allows you to see inside someone else's life and their hardships, happy moments. But at the same time, a bad one didn't teach you a single thing. So I came across that kind of book, and it's heart-breaking.
Spoiler Alert Warning -
Yin and Yang is a story of Surbhi Midha, born and raised in Faridabad, Haryana. Daughter of Sanjeev and Aabha Rosy Vatsa, and younger sister of Anjouri. Surbhi worked in different industries and tried her luck in business too.
That's it. Nothing else. Why I'm saying this? Read further.
Last year, I read Surbhi's mother's autobiography, The Gift of Life, and learned many things from Aabha's point of view. If I haven't read it, I'll have more problems with this book than I already have. In Yin and Yang, Surbhi did mention his father, but not his name even once. She shares that he was an alcoholic, and it affects her, Anjouri, and their mother. She states that she was depressed at one point and took therapy. These are the two topics on which she needs to come forward and talk about it genuinely.
But all she did was talking about his trips to different cities, visits to luxury hotels, club memberships, and dance performances in the family functions. Reading her story, I didn't think that she suffers from a scarcity of anything in her life, like ever. Even after she got the job (mentioned by her), her family provides her well, and it is okay. But the story, especially when it's a memoir, requires the stuff you never talked about, the hidden pain and feelings. Unfortunately, this whole book lacks it.
The story has a lot of promotion to Aabha's book in general, including her poems from time to time. However, there was not a single time in my reading experience when I connect with Surbhi.
She needed to come forward with the story where she can talk about her feelings when her parents were getting a divorce or when her mother goes to an asylum, childhood traumas, anecdotes with friends and siblings, her fears, relatives that interfere in their family affairs, her company with Michael and learning from that failures, growing up in a house with an alcoholic father and how she dealt with all these. These topics will make her story worth reading. But she didn't narrate these.
All the things Surbhi shared seem shallow and family-pleasing. The content is also repetitive and chaotic, not to mention unwanted materials. There were a few grammatical errors as well. The only thing I like was the illustrations. This book is non-fiction, but it has to be under travelogues. If you want to know where you should go and what to visit, eat, and where to stay in a particular city, pick this book. I'm so disappointed, and I really hope that Surbhi Midha makes all the changes and republish this book.
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