The Bollywood Bride - Sonali Dev (Bollywood #2)

This is another one of those books that I've had for ages but, despite being intrigued by it, just never got it.  When you own a book, sometimes reading it doesn't seem as pressing as reading all of your library books that have due dates attached to them!  But the Popsugar Reading Challenge for 2018 has a category for "A book by an author of a different ethnicity than you," and since this was hovering so close to the top of my to-read list anyway, it was an easy one to slot in for that category.

Given the title of the book, with the emphasis on the word "Bride," I thought that this was going to be a romance.  While there is a romantic plot, perhaps one that is really the central driving force of the book, what this really felt like was a book about family, particularly family you choose over family you're born to.  Heroine Ria was mostly raised by her aunt and uncle following a terrible encounter with her mentally-ill mother, and while she and her father loved each other, their relationship was strained by that encounter and everything that followed it.  But Ria is now somewhat estranged from her aunt and uncle, who she kind of sees as her real parents, stemming from a secret relationship with her not-cousin (seriously, not her cousin, but around a lot, and the cousin of her cousin) that ended poorly on several fronts.  Ria has spent the last decade in India as a Bollywood star, and returns to Chicago and her family in order to attend the wedding of her actual, blood cousin who is more like a brother to her than anything.

Ria is perhaps not the ideal heroine.  She's kind of mean, and deliberately does things that hurt people.  Ostensibly she does these things to protect them, but it seems like what would really be better would be letting people make informed decisions for themselves.  Vikram is also kind of terrible.  He holds grudges and does spiteful things, and while he might be entitled to do so, he doesn't just hurt Ria, he hurts everyone else around him in the process.  However, they are surrounded by absolutely wonderful people who love and support each other and welcome misfits into their fold and make everyone around them feel wanted.  They keep each others' secrets, but to actually protect each other, rather than out of some misguided sense of righteousness.  Ria's aunt and uncle are both wonderful, her cousin is wonderful, his fiancee is wonderful, the aunties are wonderful, everyone is wonderful except our main characters.  Luckily this isn't a book that depended totally on romance between the heroine and hero to propel it; the supporting characters were so important in building the feeling in the story.

The writing itself is decent; Dev an write a good romantic scene, but I think her true strength was in those wonderful family scenes, and even more so in descriptions of food!  Oh geeze, I got so hungry reading this book.  I wanted to eat so much Indian food, it wasn't even funny.  Except Indian food is like a million dollars in the United States, and so I didn't.

Overall, a good book, and I might be interested in readings others by Dev--but not the sequel to this one, because it sounds depressing af.

3.5 stars out of 5.