Review by Amanda Majors -- Mock My Words by Chandra Shekhar

[Amanda Majors]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Mock My Words" by Chandra Shekhar.]

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3 out of 4 stars

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Mock My Words was the first published novel of Chandra Shekhar, who came to the US from India to study Artificial Intelligence, switched to science journalism and then turned to fiction writing. The novel was about a Chinese National named David Tan who was hired as a professor of classic fiction writing in a San Francisco university, partially due to being dubbed a literary genius after writing two well written English novels, despite struggling to speak English grammatically. The novel had three overlapping storylines of David, David's American wife, Laura, and Melissa, a business student from the same university. It was not a "beginning, middle, cliff-hanger and end" type of story. The story went from a journal diary to a mystery/suspense to a tragedy to a romance.

My most favourite part was the title of the book, which was a clever play on words to the phrase "mark my words". All three characters struggled being heard. The middle of the book was filled with action and suspense influenced by the author's history with computer technology. Both the middle and the end of the story came to a full circle, which gave it a double layer of satisfaction.

This book would have had a higher level of enjoyment if the main focus of the novel was Laura. David's story dragged on due to his character flaw of being a glutton for punishment. Melissa's part was thrown in to add an extra dynamic to David's story and to give David a borderline controversy. They demonized the wife and painted her as an abrupt emotional rollercoaster who waffled between undesirable or unproductive objectives, yet her part picked up the pace of the story and gave a reason to keep reading. The profanities in this book also belonged to the wife and a supporting character named Harry, conveying these characters' lack of control or uninhibited nature.

My least favourite part was the author's choice to break the main character's English throughout the book. The author, coming from India, may have been expressing some of his linguistic struggles since he came from outside of United States, but choosing to break his Chinese character's English diction gave an air of "mocking". Changing the speech patterns of someone with a different linguistic background ran the risk of stereotyping and being linguistically inaccurate or inconsistent with their lexicon.

Outside of David's and David's father's broken English, which was deliberate and sometimes jolting, there were a few other areas of concern. They involved a few run-on sentences that showed up in the early few chapters. This could have also been intentional to exemplify the non-stop exhausting situation. There were awkward wording or phrase choices which interrupted the flow of the reading. This may have been there to demonstrate that even though David spoke simply, there were moments of complexity and sophistication. There were a couple of unclear references, not knowing what or who was being referred to and minor misplacements of articles/prepositions.

I would give this a 3 out of 4, because it was a short easy read at 215 pages, which I would recommend to young adults and anyone looking for a quick novel. Some of the unexpected vocabularies added some flourish for anyone interested in building a word-of-the-day list. The story was too predictable and I waited the whole novel for exciting parts and/or for the story to pick up.

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Mock My Words
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