Aubiobook Review: The Matchmaker’s List by Sonya Lalli

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

One devoted modern girl + a meddlesome, traditional grandmother = a heartwarming multicultural romantic comedy about finding love where you least expect it

Raina Anand may have finally given in to family pressure and agreed to let her grandmother play matchmaker, but that doesn’t mean she has to like it–or that she has to play by the rules. Nani always took Raina’s side when she tried to push past the traditional expectations of their tight-knit Indian-immigrant community, but now she’s ambushing Raina with a list of suitable bachelors. Is it too much to ask for a little space? Besides, what Nani doesn’t know won’t hurt her…

As Raina’s life spirals into a parade of Nani-approved bachelors and disastrous blind dates, she must find a way out of this modern-day arranged-marriage trap without shattering her beloved grandmother’s dreams.

My Thoughts:

The Matchmaker’s List had been on my to-read list for a while, and after a few heavier books, I thought this would make a nice, light change of pace. And yes, it did, but it was also frustrating and ultimately disappointing.

In The Matchmaker’s List, Raina is 29 years old, a serious career woman — an investment banker — coming off a break-up with the love of her life. Dev is another investment banker, hard-driven in a way that Raina isn’t, and always puts his career ahead of their relationship. Raina is so blinded by love that she puts up with it, until she just can’t any more. As the book starts, Raina is living back in Canada after her time in London with Dev has ended, single, and devoted to her grandmother Nani, the woman who raised her.

Raina’s best friend Shay is newly engaged, and Shay’s mother Sarla is planning the ultimate Indian wedding bonanza. Nani just wants to see Raina settled as well, so she convinces Raina to go on a series of blind dates with suitable men from Nani’s list. The men are, for the most part, duds — arrogant or looking for an insta-mommy to their kids or just plain strange, and Raina is so not into it.

It’s a fairly cute set-up so far, right? Raina wants to please her Nani, and she’s not having any romantic success on her own, so why not try some traditional matchmaking? Except Raina is still hung up on Dev, who stays in touch just enough to keep Raina on the hook.

And here’s where I got really turned off by Raina’s character: After a misunderstanding, Raina lets Nani think she’s gay. In fact, she confirms it, thinking it’ll stay between the two of them and keep Nani from pursuing even more extreme measures to find her a prime Indian man to marry. Of course, it doesn’t stay between them, and soon, the entire Indian community knows the “truth” about Raina, causing a huge amount of scandal and division, and leading to Nani being shunned by the women she used to be friends with.

Still, Raina keeps up the fiction, even when she sees that Nani has been browsing the internet to learn more about gay rights and how to support one’s gay chldren, even investigating reproductive options for lesbian couples. Yup, Nani is ready to become a gay rights activist in defense of her beloved Raina. Raina still doesn’t back down — not even when the boy she used to babysit, now 18 years old, uses Raina’s “coming out” as inspiration for his own, pushing him out of the closet before he’s really ready and causing a huge rift within his family.

On top of Raina’s ongoing lie, which feels like a cop-out to me, so unnecessary and causing so much drama and tension, she just doesn’t strike me as a particularly good friend or nice person. When Shay mentions that she’d like to introduce Raina to one of her fiancé’s friends who’s just back from traveling the world for the past few years, Raina labels him a drifter and dismisses him — and when she meets him, she immediately decides he’s a stoner with no real evidence to support her conclusion, and continues to refer to him that way to his face even during additional encounters. Judgmental much?

What seems the most unforgivable to me is the huge fight she and Shay have during Shay’s bachelorette weekend, when Shay hears from Sarla that Raina is a lesbian. Shay knows that that’s a lie, and confronts Raina, and the two end up in a screaming match, during which Raina says this awful thing to Shay:

“I wonder if Julien would still marry you if he knew what a slut you used to be.”

Really? Slut-shaming her best friend? And threatening her this way? Just disgusting.

As is the way with what’s supposed to be a breezy romantic story, things of course work out for Raina and she ends up meeting the man of her dreams, getting the awful ex-boyfriend out of her life, telling the truth to Nani, and making up with the boy who came out because of her and felt horribly betrayed. And of course, she and Shay make up and are closer than ever, with Shay supporting Raina every step of the way.

And really, I just couldn’t. How could Shay possibly forgive Raina after the horrible thing she said? I’m sorry, I don’t care how angry Raina was (without justification, I might add) — I think her actions and statements were pretty unforgivable.

Also, by allowing Nani to believe she was gay, she thrust her unprepared grandmother into a controversy that caused her all sorts of grief and turmoil. Raina later seems to be using the experience to show how sexual orientation shouldn’t matter in terms of being loved and supported by one’s family and community, but it felt like co-opting someone else’s struggle. Raina, a straight woman, pretending to be a lesbian for her own convenience, and somehow holding herself up as a symbol of pride and equality? No.

I wish I could say the story itself is charming enough to get me to see past these issues, but it’s not. It wasn’t a slog to get through or anything — the narrative moves along quickly, and there are plenty of amusing incidents and vignettes that keep the pace going. Nani is a great character, and I enjoyed the sections that showed the complications of Raina’s childhood, her mother’s life, and the backstory for her relationship with Nani.

The cultural elements are also quite good — I loved getting the little snippets about Raina cooking with Nani or enjoying their favorite Bollywood movies together, as well as the customs surrounding a traditional Hindu wedding, and can only imagine how spectacular it might be to actually be there and experience the gorgeous clothing and amazing tastes and sounds and smells.

Still, that doesn’t outweigh how offensive I found so many of Raina’s actions. I’d love to hear opposing thoughts, of course. But for myself, I can’t really recommend this book, despite its occasional amusing and entertaining parts.

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The details:

Title: The Matchmaker’s List
Author: Sonya Lalli
Narrator: Soneela Nankani
Publisher: Berkley Books
Publication date: February 5, 2019
Audiobook length: 10 hours, 40 minutes
Printed book length: 352 pages
Genre: Contemporary romance
Source: Library

12Jun2019

Shelf Control #170: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

Posted in Shelf Control by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Welcome to Shelf Control — an original feature created and hosted by Bookshelf Fantasies.

Shelf Control is a weekly celebration of the unread books on our shelves. Pick a book you own but haven’t read, write a post about it (suggestions: include what it’s about, why you want to read it, and when you got it), and link up! For more info on what Shelf Control is all about, check out my introductory post, here.

Want to join in? Shelf Control posts go up every Wednesday. See the guidelines at the bottom of the post, and jump on board!

Title: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
Author: Balli Kaur Jaswal
Published: 2017
Length: 304 pages

What it’s about (synopsis via Goodreads):

A lively, sexy, and thought-provoking East-meets-West story about community, friendship, and women’s lives at all ages—a spicy and alluring mix of Together Tea and Calendar Girls.

Every woman has a secret life . . .

Nikki lives in cosmopolitan West London, where she tends bar at the local pub. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she’s spent most of her twenty-odd years distancing herself from the traditional Sikh community of her childhood, preferring a more independent (that is, Western) life. When her father’s death leaves the family financially strapped, Nikki, a law school dropout, impulsively takes a job teaching a “creative writing” course at the community center in the beating heart of London’s close-knit Punjabi community.

Because of a miscommunication, the proper Sikh widows who show up are expecting to learn basic English literacy, not the art of short-story writing. When one of the widows finds a book of sexy stories in English and shares it with the class, Nikki realizes that beneath their white dupattas, her students have a wealth of fantasies and memories. Eager to liberate these modest women, she teaches them how to express their untold stories, unleashing creativity of the most unexpected—and exciting—kind.

As more women are drawn to the class, Nikki warns her students to keep their work secret from the Brotherhood, a group of highly conservative young men who have appointed themselves the community’s “moral police.” But when the widows’ gossip offers shocking insights into the death of a young wife—a modern woman like Nikki—and some of the class erotica is shared among friends, it sparks a scandal that threatens them all.

How and when I got it:

I picked up a Kindle edition when there was a one-day price drop, about a year ago.

Why I want to read it:

I thought this book sounded completely charming when I first heard of it… and apparently Reese Witherspoon agrees with me, because it ended up as one of her book club selections. I’m always drawn to immigrant stories, and I love the idea of a women’s writing class exploring erotica as a way of expressing themselves and forming a community.

What do you think? Would you read this book?

Please share your thoughts!

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Want to participate in Shelf Control? Here’s how:

Write a blog post about a book that you own that you haven’t read yet.
Add your link in the comments!
If you’d be so kind, I’d appreciate a link back from your own post.
Check out other posts, and…

Have fun!

11Feb2019

Book Review: A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Mili Rathod hasn’t seen her husband in twenty years–not since she was promised to him at the age of four. Yet marriage has allowed Mili a freedom rarely given to girls in her village. Her grandmother has even allowed her to leave India and study in America for eight months, all to make her the perfect modern wife. Which is exactly what Mili longs to be–if her husband would just come and claim her.

Bollywood’s favorite director, Samir Rathod, has come to Michigan to secure a divorce for his older brother. Persuading a naive village girl to sign the papers should be easy for someone with Samir’s tabloid-famous charm. But Mili is neither a fool nor a gold-digger. Open-hearted yet complex, she’s trying to reconcile her independence with cherished traditions. And before he can stop himself, Samir is immersed in Mili’s life – cooking her dal and rotis, escorting her to her roommate’s elaborate Indian wedding, and wondering where his loyalties and happiness lie.

A Bollywood Affair is my book group’s selection for February — we do have a tendency to go romance-themed each year at this time, and the results have been decidely mixed for me. I’m not a romance reader, although I do enjoy a good love story every so often. Still, there are elements of the genre that just don’t float my boat, but more on that later…

In A Bollywood Affair, we start with a marriage between two children. Mili, at age 4, is married off to Virat, a much older 12 years old, by arrangement between their grandparents. Apparently, mass weddings between children are traditional in the region of Mili’s birth. And while the two children are immediately separated, they’re expected to eventually live as man and wife once they’re old enough. Meanwhile, Mili’s grandmother raises her to be a perfect wife, and only at Mili’s insistence that her husband would want her to be as educated as city girls is she allowed to attend university and pursue an education.

At age 24, Mili travels to Michigan for graduate work in sociology, aiming to work toward her goal of improving the lives of women in India. She has no money though, and her fellowship leaves her only the barest subsistence to get by on.

Back in India, Virat and his pregnant wife learn that the annulment of his marriage to his child bride was never finalized, and he’s worried that this will interfere with the well-being of his wife and baby. Virat’s younger brother Samir, a playboy heart-throb who is (of course) gorgeous and has (of course) a heart of gold hidden beneath his player, bad boy exterior, is sent to America to get Mili to sign the annulment papers once and for all. And (of course), things get complicated.

Mili is klutzy, innocent, and awkward, and immediately rides a bike into a tree and injures herself in Samir’s presence, so he has no choice but to stay and take care of her, hiding the true reason for his arrival. He’s drawn to her sweetness and beauty; she’s drawn to his kindness and amazing biceps. They open up to each other emotionally, but the secret reason for Samir’s presence looms in the background, ready to ruin the love growing between the two of them.

Mili is a little too naive to be believable, and Samir is too much of the bad-boy-who-is-secretly-good stereotype. Mili clings to her vision of her marriage and the husband who will someday claim her as his wife, even as she works to better the status of women’s rights in India. Samir puts up with an awful lot to be near Mili, and it’s kind of hard to buy his willingness to immediately devote himself to her. Both being gorgeous, amazing in the kitchen, and absolutely fantastic people, they are naturally and immediately drawn to each other, and (we’re told) have a strong chemistry that keeps them both lusting after one another pretty much constantly.

Look, I basically liked the story, but I have issues. First off, please spare me from any book in which the main male character names his penis. Sorry, but no. I do not want to hear Samir refer to “Little Sam”, not once and not repeatedly. I also don’t want to hear about Mili’s “dark crevices”, as in…

Her name rumbled in his chest. She felt the sound rather than heard it and warmth melted through her like molten gold filling a mold at the goldsmith’s. It slid into her heart and into the deep dark crevices of her body.

Did I mention already that I’m not really a romance reader? I’m no prude, but I don’t need every detail of a sexual encounter spelled out for me — body parts and fluids and the rest. The overblown language during the sex scenes just immediately pulled me out (no pun intended) of the mood and made me giggle instead:

She let him jab into her, free her, tangle her. She tasted him, breathed him in. His smoky taste, clean and dark and hot. His tongue, hungry and probing and hot. His heavy shoulders under her fingers, firm and yielding and hot.

Yes. Hot. I get it.

Man, do I sound mean right now, but honestly, this kind of writing just doesn’t work for me.

That said, I actually enjoyed a lot of the story, when the gasping and tasting and “liquid skin” and “sensitive, secret flesh” weren’t getting in the way. I really liked the descriptions of the foods and the clothing and the traditions that we see through Mili and Samir’s experiences, and the backstory about Samir’s childhood is both upsetting and touching. The obligatory secret between the main characters (there wouldn’t be much of a plot without it) makes the drama feel forced at times, but I came to care enough about Mili and Samir as people that I was willing to overlook most of the elements that I didn’t care for.

Would I recommend this book? I’d say it’s a very qualified… maybe. I don’t regret reading it, and I’m looking forward to discussing it with my book group — despite the fact that this isn’t the type of book I’d usually choose to read. Still, if you’re a fan of steamy scenes in the midst of your love stories, you may truly love A Bollywood Affair!

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The details:

Title: A Bollywood Affair
Author: Sonali Dev
Publisher: Kensington
Publication date: October 28, 2014
Length: 304 pages
Genre: Romance
Source: Purchased

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