Title: And Before She Realised It
Author: Piroja Shroff
Publisher: Notion Press
Genre: Contemporary Romance
First Publication: 2022
Language: English
Book Summary: And Before She Realised It by Piroja Shroff
Nadia is like every other girl. She dates, she has friends, she has baggage with her parents, she thinks she has fallen in love and she hopes to live happily ever after. But what makes her journey different is that this is the second time she is living through it.
Nadia has lived, loved and made all these mistakes once before. The last time, by the end of her life, she spiralled hard, hit rock bottom and before she realised it, an epiphany crept in. She finally saw what she could have done differently.
So, she was granted a second chance; a reset.
Her ever-present cheerleader, God, resets her life so she can live through the same circumstances once more and hopefully, choose with courage this time.
But shaking age-old patterns is harder than she had anticipated. Making tough choices is not everyone’s cup of chai, you know.
Can Nadia actually alter her course in this reset?
Or is she doomed to repeat her story all over again?
Book Review: And Before She Realised It by Piroja Shroff
Reading ‘And Before She Realised It’ was an intensely humbling and inspirational experience. It isn’t about drama or angst or love story, it is a powerful, eye-opening story focused on faith and redemption; on rising up from the dust of despair and finding yourself worthy. It’s about the unparalleled ways love and faith can conquer all, and I could not have been more pleased with this loving and fulfilling journey.
The story chronicles the highs and lows of a young woman called Nadia as she makes her way through life. Nadia is simply a person who doesn’t have her life together. She’s been experiencing a range of emotions, including parental separation, discovery of her own identity, feelings of love and attachment, and an overall lack of self-confidence. Nadia is in a perpetual state of confusion and reflecting on her mistakes and contemplating other courses of action that she may have pursued but did not. God, who is always there to encourage her, resets her life so that she may go through the same experiences again and perhaps make decisions that are more courageous this time. She experiences the voyage of life for a second time, and while she does so, she comes to various realisations about her present life and gains new insights into it.
‘And Before She Realised It’ by Piroja Shroff is so eye-opening and really shows you how every single decision you make – big or small – can change your life forever. But it also shows you how some things are inevitable, and are meant to be, and are going to happen to you at one point or another in your life. Every single minute we are making decisions that have the power to completely change our lives, and maybe there’s a version of us out there who is living the life of the decision we didn’t make. It’s so powerful to believe that we might have control over our own fate, but that maybe there are some things that will happen to us no matter what we do.
It was such an honest portrayal of life, there were hardships and victories, love and loss, laughter and tears, hard choices and lucky breaks. It was incredibly real and Piroja Shroff’s writing made the characters so relatable, believable, and understandable. The two realities shown are quite complex — as life naturally is — so there’s a lot going on in this book. Honestly, it was fascinating, and there was just never a dull moment. But even though a lot was happening, it was so well written that it was always gripping, never confusing, and loaded with feels.
I find it so fascinating that there is no clear indication that one life was better than the other. I mean, you as a reader can choose which life you liked better for her, but I feel like ultimately, a lot of the same things happened in both realities, and the things that were different did not feel necessarily better. For me, like I said in the beginning, it was just an illustration that there is probably never going to be a perfect life no matter what decision you take, and you just have to work with what life gives you and enjoy it.
The overall message of this book gives so much hope, because no matter where we end up, we have to find happiness with what we’ve been given in life. Our decisions make us who we are, and we have to embrace it. We might have some control over what happens to us, but there is so much more that isn’t up to us and is inevitably going to happen and we have to embrace it and find happiness in the little things.
