This is the kind of book that sticks with you for a while. It took a while for me to get through it. Like India, it was a little too much and all over the place, but also impressive in its too-muchness. It takes a long time for Sonia and Sunny to actually meet, and it’s so wordy, with interwoven stories, that at times it felt like a slog. Still very impressive in its richness. At times it was too purple for my liking, but it was still obviously well written.
Sonia moves from India to the US for college, and ends up meeting a mercurial artist. He preys on her loneliness, abuses and belittles her, then abandons her, but not before keeping one of Sonia’s most cherished possessions, a family heirloom amulet. In her loneliness and desperation, Sonia accepts her father’s offer of an arranged marriage. He reaches out to a family he knows with the marriage proposition.
Sunny lives in New York with his mid-western American girlfriend. When his mother in India sends the arranged marriage info, she words it in a way that makes it clear accepting the offer would be a mistake. She doesn’t even know that Sunny has a girlfriend, but she is jealous and dismissive.
The book weaves in stories of both families, and how their jealousy, loneliness, love, and fear creates fissures in their relationships. When Sunny and Sonia finally meet, there is an instant connection, but personal demons and family meddling get in the way. They reconnect and separate several times throughout the book, dealing with parallel struggles. Sonia’s eventual friendship with Sunny’s mother was satisfying, and I liked when Sunny finally retrieved the amulet from Sonia’s abuser. It was a book worth reading. (8)
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