Six Degrees-Game of Blogs brought back a flood of memories for me. Having been a part of this activity in one of the teams and having made an awesome bunch of blogger friends, reading this book reminded me of the eagerness with which we had participated in this activity. It was a great learning experience and I completely understand how challenging it must have been for the rest of the teams to coordinate across different time zones with fellow bloggers of different tenets.
This book consists of three stories by three teams of bloggers who were randomly grouped for the activity; mind you each story is a collaborative work with the story being written in a couple of days with twists and turns being provided by Blogadda in between. There is a reason why I cite this here, since the characters and a large part of the skeleton of the story was already provided, the teams had to build a story based on it. We did have our limitations.
The stories published in this book are:
1. The Awakening- Team By Lines
2. Entangled Lives- Team Potliwale Baba
3. Missing- A Journey Within- Team Tete-A-Ten
I have an admittance to make here, if this book was not written through this interesting activity I wouldn’t have picked it up to read. All through the activity I had a strong opinion on the various stories that we as teams were weaving up, all of them never felt anything beyond the 'contemporary-below average-Indian-fiction'. Since there was no forum to express this opinion, and we bloggers were busy with our own stories working on the plot and dealing with the tight deadlines I brought this up here. One of the stories in this book in fact rightly cites the pun” Write your college love story and become a bestselling author” well that’s how Indian authors are nowadays. I write this with great trepidation on how this review will be taken.
While ‘The Awakening’ primarily feels like a science fiction, the highlight for me was the amount of research and imagination that has gone into it. Kudos to the team on that, all the inventiveness with the alien world and interesting trivia was the only reason I thought this story was the best among the three.
The second story ‘Entangled Lives’ left me as a reader entangled too, supposedly this was a murder mystery. And of course there had to be a medical disorder to spice it up. What bogged me down was the entire tone of the story, the usage of some words and the bloopers in the plot. All I wanted to know was who killed and why, nothing out of the ordinary!
The third one ‘Missing- A Journey Within’ has everything missing by the way. I still am thinking about the duodenal atresia that two of the characters have, what did this medical condition do to them to make them go missing. I wish there was more research and relevance here. One noticeable fact is the strength that has been added to some characters, especially by bringing up some important social issues like homosexuality and rape. I wish this was dealt with more refinement.
The stories are not by seasoned authors, the stories are not an individual effort and the stories had their boundaries. I think that explains why the book deserves three stars, probably two point five will do.
Rating: 2.5/5
Book
Details:
Title:
- Six Degrees by Blogadda
Publisher:
-Leadstart Publishing and BlogAdda.Com
Publication
Year: - 2015
ISBN:- 9352013891
(ISBN13: 9789352013890)
Binding:
- Paperback
Number
of pages: - 422
Price:
- Rs349
PS: 6 Degrees is India's first book published through collaborative blogging,
written completely by bloggers for the Game of Blogs activity at
BlogAdda. Know more about Game of Blogs here. You can buy 6 Degrees: Game of Blogs if you liked the review. :)
