As a lover of rom-coms my bookshelf is filled with the stories that made my heart flutter – no matter how cheesy. Yet, most of these stories were of characters who looked nothing like me. So you can guess how excited I was when I found a story with Indian characters based on the romance queen, Jane Austen’s, work.
(tw: suicide, alcoholism, sexual assualt)
In this adaptation of Austen’s “Persuasion,” “Recipe for Persuasion” by Sonali Dev tells the story of Indian-American Ashna Raje in her second chance romance with her former high-school boyfriend and current FIFA winning footballer, Rico Silva. Ashna is the owner of Curried Dreams, an Indian restaurant left by her father. The restaurant is no longer overflowing as it once was, and Ashna struggles to find the money to help this dream survive. Like the coincidences only excused in romance novels, her friends offer her a job on a reality cooking show. She’ll be working with a celebrity on the show, and determined to prove herself, she swallows her stage fright and accepts. Little does she know the boy whose heart she broke and who’s left her heart broken sees her on the show and swoops in to be her celebrity chef. As you can imagine, the two go from cold retorts to revelations about their past, leading to their ultimate happily ever after.
While disguised as a simple love story, Dev writes a smart and tragic story of a complicated family, the resilience of the women, and overcoming the unfairness of life.
Ashna witnessed her parents fighting throughout childhood, with her mother leaving her with her father for months at a time to tend to her philanthropic efforts – leading to her apprehension towards her mother. Her young adult life was no better – she finds her father after his suicide and is left to pick up the pieces and make sense of her life. Through various perspectives, we see the abusive relationship between her parents, and the truth behind Ashna’s very existence and the tragedy of Ashna and Rico’s high school relationship.
The book takes you on a journey, and shows us why exactly we should judge a person based on our first impressions. Characters we are quick to make judgements about – either positive or negative – are shattered as we delve into their backgrounds. We see their shameful pasts or their redeemable actions and view the characters with a completely new perspective by the end of the story. Dev expertly narrates the intimate and often tragic details of the Raje family, exploring Indian cultural intricacies and complicated family relationships.
These characters remind us what it means to be family – even a broken one aching to be put back together – and the value of some really good Indian food 🙂