A Dowryless Wedding by Merlin Franco – Book Review

Book – A Dowryless Wedding
Author – Merlin Franco
Publisher – Authors Upfront
First Published – 2018
Pages – 225
Ideal reading for – Casual readers of fiction, readers who love sarcastic tales and also the regular trendwatchers in Indian fiction

Not many days you get to read books which are amusing when you want them to be and serious if you look at them that way. Merlin Franco’s debut book, A Dowryless Wedding is the same kind of a versatile book which can pose itself as anything you want it to be – a sensible novel, a humorous novel, a light satire and a sincere take of realistic issues prevalent in Indian society. Today, I am going to summarise my experience with this book and I hope you will have a clear idea of what to do next with this.

The book starts with a weird incident of friendship and a typical scene at an Indian educational institution and then the social system of India takes over. Franklin, who is an atheist and subscribes to the Communist ideology, incidentally or by luck, gets married to Nisha, who is a simple girl rather in the shadow of her parents. After the marriage, the novel takes a different shape and Franklin, who had high ideals of a dowryless marriage, begins to find himself shredded day-by-day. What happens next? What happens to the marriage? What happens to the car that is ‘gifted’ to the bride by her parents? All this will be discovered by the readers themselves when they read the book… I enjoyed my share of this!

In the novel, you will see Merlin Franco taking you to the small town in South India and then into the drawing room, dining room and the bedroom of the young couple who try to settle their lives after marriage but that unlikely happens because their marriage is not what they think it could be. As a reader, you will surely like the progress of the novel as it happens with the course of time. Merlin has tried to portray the issues of seriousness in a lighter way and it has paid off. The novel is full of instances where the readers will feel amused.

Without saying a lot, I will only say that A Dowryless Wedding is a perfect read for the lovers of Indian innovative fiction. Plot construction, theme, narrative and even the vocabulary of the book is certainly at a level which is above the general ones which are published in masses. You can get a piece of this fiction from Amazon India by following the link below:

Merlin Franco’s Book – buy on Amazon India – Click here

review by Nilesh for Literature News