Body Of Work by Mansi Babbar has been presented by Ravi Subramanian and published by Harper Collins. Body of Work is about two women – Raina and Hera – one is the protagonist and the other is the antagonist. Not many books come along our way where both the leads are female and the story is written by a woman. Thumbs up on that.

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Raina is a film journalist and its clear to the readers that she has some sort of beef with this larger than life character Hera. She herself is stuck reporting in a beat that wasn’t her first choice, and while trying to make peace with that, she is on a mission to present to the world Hera’s web of deceit, manipulation, and treachery.

Despite having brought public humiliation (or at least, attempted to) on Hera, Raina finds herself invited at one of the star’s glittery events. She has to attend the event against her will as her boss makes it her only chance to redeem herself and her job after the last mishap she had apparently created regarding her reporting on Hera.

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Trying to salvage her own reputation as a reporter and secretly wishing to find the truth behind the fake image Hera has created and led the world to believe, Hera arrives at the party with a colleague. The party is mostly uneventful, though she does manage to investigate a bit successfully. By some turn of events, Raina finds herself spending the night at Hera’s home and what happens after that was something she wouldn’t have imagined in her wildest dreams.

And as someone who has read the book, I will tell you, even you wouldn’t have guessed! Without getting further into the story because it is after this point that a LOT happens, and you’ll need to read the story to keep up with it, I will talk about what I liked in this book and what didn’t work for me.

Mansi Babbar knows how to write. Her command over the language, her style of writing, her narration, everything is impressive.  She has paid attention to all the characters she has included in the story and given them time to build themselves into the story.

What didn’t work for me was the story itself. It starts off slow and since one knows that it’s a thriller, one keeps imagining which path the plot will take. Its okay to be surprised and see the plot take a new path, but here, it went somewhere weird. While the climax is most unpredictable, I had to force myself to finish reading the story (it helped that the book is short). Raina’s backstory was interesting and could have been woven into the story with more power.

One might argue that I am unhappy with the story because of genre sub-type isn’t what I enjoy reading but wouldn’t a good book have made me like it anyway? I’d love to read more of Mansi’s books, but probably in some other genre.

Blurb of Body Of Work by Mansi Babbar:

If only she hadn’t been greedy for news … An ambitious young reporter, Raina is stuck in a rut, covering dull movie gossip and pointless press conferences for the magazine Glitterbug. So when she gets a whiff of a scandal about superstar Hera and her dubious dealings, Raina is feverish with excitement. This is the opportunity she needs. To get right into the story, Raina enters the lioness’s den. But what she finds concealed in the mansion are secrets beyond her imaginings. Over the course of just one night, Raina gets sucked into a dangerous world built on deceit, power and mind games. Will she survive this ordeal? Body of Work is a story about giving in to one’s darkest desires-a chilling account of the secrets we keep and the hold they have over us.

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Buy Body Of Work by Mansi Babbar here:

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Read my ebook WRITE. EDIT. PROMOTE. to learn the basics about becoming an author – from writing your own book, to editing your first draft, and to promoting your book yourself! You can also read my ebook How To Write A Story Effectively and learn some valuable lessons about how a story can go from average to extraordinary. This book is part 1 of the series.

In fiction, I have two short stories for children in an ebook called Bedtime Stories.