Character development: ✰✰
Plot/Writing style: ✰✰
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that only in an overachieving Indian American family can a genius daughter be considered a black sheep.Dr. Trisha Raje is San Francisco's most acclaimed neurosurgeon. But that's not enough for the Rajes, her influential immigrant family who's achieved power by making its own non-negotiable rules: never trust an outsider; never do anything to jeopardize your brother's political aspirations; and never, ever, defy your family. Trisha is guilty of breaking all three rules. But now she has a chance to redeem herself. So long as she doesn't repeat old mistakes.Up-and-coming chef DJ Caine has known people like Trisha before, people who judge him by his rough beginnings and place pedigree above character. He needs the lucrative job the Rajes offer, but he values his pride too much to indulge Trisha's arrogance. And then he discovers that she's the only surgeon who can save his sister's life. As the two class, their assumptions crumble like the spun sugar on one of DJ's stunning desserts. But before a future can be savored there's a past to be reckoned with...A family trying to build home in a new land.A man who has never felt at home anywhere.And a choice to be made between the two."
Now that I've finished this book, the description seems wildly inaccurate to me. Trisha doesn't strike me as in any way the black sheep of the family. The book does open with a pretty early reference to her estrangement from her family; however, it is pretty quickly revealed that it's a mutual decision, and even early on we have indications that her lack of involvement with her family is more her choice (at least in the case of her siblings and mother) than theirs. Whatever the case, though, Trisha has just begun to make contact with her family again at the start of the book when she meets DJ while invading his catering kitchen during an event and immediately makes a horrible first impression. Things progress in true Pride and Prejudice fashion from there, with both Trisha and DJ firmly convinced that the other person is terrible. For what it's worth, I stood firmly on DJ's side...but that may have been because all the descriptions of his food made me want to eat it all.
I know I joked about things progressing just like Pride and Prejudice, but in actuality it didn't seem to be very closely based off of the classic story, and I can't decide if I liked that it was a looser interpretation or not. Frankly, if I hadn't known going into it that it was supposed to be a "retelling" I wouldn't have guessed that it was, and part of me feels like if they hadn't started with that premise, this would have been a better book. Specifically, the way Wickham was shoehorned in felt a little too melodramatic to me - she read like a soap opera villain, and that storyline was hard to take seriously, not to mention horribly problematic and cringeworthy. Beyond that, Trisha and her dad are also fairly terrible, and most of the characters are one-note and underdeveloped. It seemed like the author was trapped between wanting to retell a classic and wanting to write a completely original story, and the middle ground ended up...dissatisfying.
As far as the plot, not only was it lackluster, it was full to bursting with ableism. Remember that bit in the cover summary about how Trisha is the only surgeon who can save DJ's sister's life? Well, the surgery that can do that will cause Emma to lose her sight, so Emma staunchly refuses to have the surgery done because...that's right...she would rather literally die than be blind. I did not love that, and I loved it even less when a. after initially being told the surgery would damage her optic nerves she wasn't given any kind of social worker support or connected with anyone to talk through her options and b. nothing developed from there. We find out that Emma doesn't want the surgery, and then we spend like three-quarters of the book going back and forth between Trisha at the hospital thinking about being around food and arguing with DJ, Trisha being with DJ arguing, or DJ being by himself cooking, thinking about what a bitch Trisha is, and worrying about how he'll pay for Emma's (unwanted) medical procedure. Then all of a sudden at the very end of the book they're like HOLD UP, wait, we love each other! I mean I know that happens in the original Pride and Prejudice, but this felt MUCH more abrupt and, frankly, pretty forced and unexplainable, because Trisha is unbearable.
Clunky and ableist overall plot aside, there were also a couple super weird plot points included that I could not make heads or tails of. There are multiple dramatic references to how Trisha was "burned" as a child, for instance, which is basically how they excuse her being an unmitigated douche when she first meets DJ, because the extreme trauma of the experience led to her having horrible anxiety in kitchens. But then the burning story is ultimately revealed to have been like a few tiny drops of hot oil landing on her while learning how to cook something. I'm sorry but...what? Maybe it's because I was expecting a Bend It Like Beckham-esque something caught on fire and I had to get a skin graft story, or maybe it's because I have a sick burn scar wrapping halfway around my wrist from spilling bacon grease on my arm, but with the level of emphasis given to the "burning," a couple splatters of oil did not sell it for me. There was also a long, ongoing scene at the end of the book where Trisha lost a contact but refused to be seen in her "spectacles" that I could not stop rolling my eyes at. Christ on a cracker, Trisha, just put your fucking glasses on.
And finally, we have arrived at the audiobook narration, which was not my favorite. I could have lived with it at first, but then we got to DJ. Some context - Trisha grew up in California and speaks in a fairly nondescript American accent. DJ and Emma are from England and speak with British accents. And here's where the accents make things weird: the narrator speaks in a British accent for spoken dialogue coming from DJ or Emma, but does not use the accent for internal dialogue coming from DJ. And maybe this is something I should be able to move past, but it's super weird hearing an American accent say things like "he felt like a right arse" or "you are fecking unbelievable." It definitely took me out of it, and I have to give first prize to Trisha's feet "finding purchase on his arse" at the end of the book, because I could not stop laughing when I heard that. The narrator is obviously capable of pulling off a British accent, so why not just use it anytime you're reading from DJ's perspective? Or better yet, get a British person to read his character? Bleh.
Ultimately, I wouldn't say this was a bad book, necessarily, but as you can tell from my rating breakdown at the top, the biggest thing it has going for it is the initial draw. You could read the first quarter and then skip to the end, I guess. Or you could look into one of the books below instead.
- Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalalluddin
- Pride by Ibi Zoboi
- Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal
- Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi
- Love, Hate, and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed
- Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani
- When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon
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