After her parents try to set her up (again), Liya Thakkar escapes out the back door and thinks she's dodged the bullet... until the same guy shows up in her office a week later as a newly hired lawyer. It's enemies to lovers with family drama.
TW: past sexual assault, slut shaming, domestic abuse
I'm refraining from giving this book a star rating because while I didn't enjoy it, I can tell it was mainly because I really didn't like the subject matter.
Both main characters are Indian and the heroine, who is a biochemical engineer who's lived on her own since high school, is categorized as "fast" and "loose" by her father, "aunties" in the Indian community, and other men and women her age. This stems from a reputation caused by an incident when she was a minor when she was sexually assaulted by an older, married man.
I couldn't enjoy this book because my skin was crawling the whole time. Listening to so many people talk badly about her and no one standing up for her until the end was so sad. I couldn't get invested in the relationship, maybe because I was so distracted.
Afterwards, I posted my thoughts on Instagram and had a great conversation with an Indian women whose lived in India her entire life. Everything below is directly from her - I took notes during our conversation. I don't know very much at all about Indian arranged marriages or the caste system, so our conversation was very interesting and eye opening to me.
- She explained her main problem with the "arranged marriage" trope as portrayed by Indian-American authors is that it romanticizes something that that women in India live in fear of, commit suicide over, are murdered for. Cannot pretend the system is not inherently problematic.
- Arranged marriages are a highly oppressive system and a big reason it exists is to preserve the caste system.
- When books contain verbiage like "you need to marry a good Hindu boy" the unspoken meaning is: "we will not pollute the family line with a Muslim person" and is Islamophobic.
- She said, privileged Hindus in America don't find it problematic; they find it glamorous. They are the upper class of India who were affluent enough to immigrate.
We spoke for a while and both agreed that love stories for all ethnicities need to be told. Romance is still predominantly white, both in authors and characters, and so it's important for marginalized identities to have stories about romance and joy.
She cited Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev as a book with good representation of the problematic arranged marriage system and the topic of marital rape.
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