The Lost Girl by Santosh Sharma is a riveting romance novel set in a magical timeline of 80s and 90s. The novel features the story of two young lovers Vineeth and Rashmi. The lead character is Vineeth. He has taken a voluntary retirement from his job after 25 years. His aim is to find his love that goes missing around two decades back.

The novel is set in Rudrapur…but events traverse to far-off places like Rajasthan and North East India and so on.

To reconnect them the story chugs ahead with magical sweeps and memories and nostalgia of old days. But between Vineeth’s searches of Rashmi, there are many sub stories of friendship, culture, old places, etc. Rashmi’s search is a constant thought in Vineeth’s mind that lingers in the backdrop like banter. But as the novel starts, we see Vineeth catching up with a lot of his childhood friends, some are lost, and a few are migrated, but still many of them available to his welcome.

The kind of comradeship the story reflects among friends is indeed great and inspirational. The novel sounds very real due to its social elements. It talks about others lives, children, settlement and success or failure stories. One such engaging story is of Avatar Singh. When a person returns to the hometown after such a long time, one happens to get hear a lot of stories of neighborhood and around.

After a few days of arrival in the town, Vineeth commences the search of Rashmi. He discusses it with his friends but they all are clueless. Vineeth and Rashmi were living in the same town, not so far. They were in love. While Vineeth was posted to Hyderabad for a job after his MBA, Rashmi on the other hand completes her BA, but all of sudden one day she disappears from the locality with her family. Why? That needs to be discovered by Vineeth?

Will Vineeth find Rashmi? If yes, will she come back to him? Is she alive? Is their love still alive?

Our View on the Cover:

Simple and effective and self-revealing. Anyone can make out that the book is about some woman or girl. Even the title helps the cover page to blend with the inside story. A girl in shadow…this cover page is nothing less than a Bollywood movie poster. In one word – highly effective.

Characters Analysis:

The novel is good but fell short in sketching the characters. It already involved mature or well-established characters. However, Vineeth is the lead character who searches Rashmi, an important shadow character that keeps the novel moving. Other than these two, there are many characters that pour in from all directions, especially when Vineeth returns home after 25 years. But still the author managed them well, without creating any confusion.

Our Views on the Novel:

It is a heart-touching love story of love, lost, missing, and finding. Easy to read and follow, this is a great romance read if you are etching to visit that golden era of 1980s and 90s. Santosh’s writing style is superb, the way he steers the story to an unexpected territory with suspense is amazing. Truly a mesmerizing story! This novel has everything but in a restrained manner…like there is an air of tension about riots, there is tragedy, suspense, separation, heartbreaks – everything is available –good to know that that author did not exaggerated even an ounce of that.