Review of novel "Love @ Air Force".

An unhappy Sergeant, Sushil Awasthi, feels that his circumstances dumped him into doing drudgery in the Air Force and that he deserved better out of life. Grumbling often, he accuses his wife, his parents and even Air Force for his agonies. When he finds that, the newly posted medical officer, Wing Commander Shabd Mishra, is his best friend of school days, his inferiority complex plunges further down.

The Wing Commander is still hankering after his school day’s crush Soumya despite knowing of her being married to another Air Force Officer, who too is posted at the same Station. How things shape up when three classmates get together? What fate does the love story of the lovelorn Wing Commander meet? How do others around, the officers and the non officers, react to the friendship between a Sergeant and a Wing Commander?

I tend to believe that authors who bring in their own personal experiences into writing need a higher level of self-introspection while writing their stories. Reason that there is so close to the material, they tend to lose objectivity over its plot, nuances, length and most importantly, relevance to the main characters. Love@ Air Force suffers heavily on this account. As a result, the book never becomes a solid love story in the back drop of Air Force nor it acts as a much simpler story of three individuals stuck in complex circumstances.

Gaurav Sharma, who himself is a mathematician, borrows heavily from his father's life and experiences who has served in Air Force. There are things to admire in this novel. Notably, the mature romance between the three lead protagonists, the complex power structure in Air Force,  the monotonous life officers usually get sucked into and the obsession of ranks. But all these high points are buried under long passages of self-introspection and a running commentary of Air Force that as a reader you tend to lose patience and readability with the characters by the end of the book. The novel had to be much shorter and less of all this clutter to have a better impact on it's readers

The author maintains a soft tone to the characters, the flow is easy but there are numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes to encounter in the first print of the book. I am going with 2/5 for Gaurav Sharma's 'Love@ Air Force'. By the end of the book, you could just feel a tinge of disappointment. This book could have been so much more. An opportunity wasted.