If you live your whole life being who everybody else wants you to be, how do you know who you really are?
Nineteen-year-old Aaron Rutherford is already reeling from the loss of his mother, when the unexpected revelation of a dark secret from her past changes his world forever.
Forced to question everything that he has ever believed, should he simply follow the path that has been laid out for him, or will pursuing the truth help him to find what has always been missing?
As the tangled web of lies unfolds and uncertainty takes over, a startling chain of events are set in motion that will see Aaron make the journey of a lifetime to discover not only who he really is, but ultimately who he wants to be
~ Synopsis from goodreads
God, I am on a run of some really good books lately. All these books that I got last month were unknowns to me, something I accepted on impulse, but all of them are turning out to be really absorbing reads.
I picked up Finding Arun a bit reluctantly off my book shelf. There was something about the fonts and the lines were all a bit too squished together that really didn’t make me want to pick it up. But holy smoke, once I did, I just couldn’t stop reading on.
The book is the story of Aaron/Arun’s journey of self-discovery, and usually I loathe such stories. One reason why I stayed far, far away from Eat Pray Love, I think. However, in spite of its genre, I liked Finding Arun very, very much.
So What's the Book About?When Aaron’s adoptive mother dies, he comes to know that his birth mother was alive and wanted to meet him very badly. He then decides to travel from England to India to get to know his birth mother and family. The rest of the story deals with what he finds when he goes there and how this trip to India changes the rest of his life.
There are two parts to this book:
- Aaron, which deals with his life in England and his early travels in India.
- Arun, which deals with his life after he has acclimatized to his new family and life in India.
The first half of the book was very gripping. But, the second half was a bit too long-drawn out.
I had a couple of issues with the way the story pans out. First there is a boring teenage romance that frankly distracts from what I thought should be the focus of the book, which is Arun’s relationship with his siblings. Next, I really felt Arun melded too easily into the place without any adjustment issue. Here’s a boy who has lived a comfortable life in England suddenly living in an auto-rikshaw driver’s home in a village in Orissa, and life’s all rosy. Really? Somehow, this seems like a missed opportunity to add some meat/conflict to the book rather than drone on about his mooning over a teenage girl.
However towards the end, just when I thought this book was going nowhere interesting, something comes up, and Arun is forced to make a choice and prove his loyalty to this village.
That’s when the book comes back into its own again, with a not unexpected but still satisfying ending.
Overall, I liked the book very much. It’s well-written and engrossing in parts and when you consider that it’s the author Marisha Pink’s maiden effort, well, then it’s really a good start to her literary career.
You can also purchase a copy of this book from Amazon
