Title: A Bollywood Affair
Author: Sonali Dev
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Release Date: October 2014
Rating: 2/5 Stars
I always feel terrible about giving a book less than three stars, because I have the utmost respect for writers and how difficult it is to write a book in the first place. However, I still have to be honest and explain my reasoning for the low rating, because there are plenty of readers who have given this book four or five stars. I am just simply not one of them.
In A Bollywood Affair, 24-year-old Mili has just arrived in the U.S. from India where she is pursuing some kind of advanced social work degree. Her past is pretty interesting: Mili was married off at age 4 during a village wedding ceremony (that may or may not have been legal) to Virat, whose family ended up fleeing the village and she hasn’t seen him since the wedding day. She’s been living as a married woman since then, which means she hasn’t had any romantic relationships with any other men but she has had the freedom to pursue her education. Meanwhile, Virat has a half-brother named Samir who is a film director and screenwriter, who eventually meets up with Mili in the U.S. when he aims to have her sign divorce papers when Virat, who has since remarried and is expecting a child, ends up in the hospital. Virat had just received legal papers, allegedly from Mili, aiming to inherit his property if he died. As you can see, the premise is interesting and there could have been a lot of good stuff happening in this book. It just all kind of fell apart for me as the story progressed.
I’ll start off with the good: the writing itself. I believe this was Dev’s first book, and the writing is actually really excellent. There are some turns of phrase and some beautiful imagery that she crafted in A Bollywood Affair, and the story definitely made me hungry for Indian food (the characters discuss food quite a bit). Also, the initial twist to the story is a compelling one: a woman thinks of herself as married and lives her life assuming that her husband will come back to her eventually, and in the meantime enjoys rights and privileges she may not have had she been a single woman growing up in her village. She was able to be educated, live in the city, and have a job that she was passionate about. Mili could have been a strong character, but unfortunately, her characterization was a bit off to me.
First of all, the world of the characters is strikingly misogynistic, which is something I don’t care for in my romance novels. Mili slut shames other women, herself, and, despite all her accomplishments, longs to be a perfect wife. Female characters besides Mili who rebel against patriarchal norms are characterized as obnoxious and oversexed (her roommate and ‘best friend’, Rhidi), and are contrasted with the pure, chaste Mili. Mili is characterized as being ‘not like other women’, which implies that there is something wrong with women in general and she happens to be the special goddess who makes love to her food but is a pure virgin, who has a perfect, tiny body despite never exercising and living off of chocolate bars, and who is so true to a husband she met once as a four-year-old that a man even looking at her makes her feel impure. That is, until she meets Samir, who looks like a Bollywood star but can cook like an Indian grandma. As soon as Samir is introduced, Mili is completely reliant on him: she's injured, so he helps her get around, she has no food, so he buys her groceries, he even pays off her boss so that she doesn't have to work! She loses so much agency as soon as Samir enters her life.
Don’t even get me started on Samir himself. I hated Samir so much, words nearly fail me. First of all, I disliked the way he was described. Samir is half-white and half-Indian, but for some reason he is constantly described as having ‘marble-white skin’ and ‘dark gold hair’. I cannot for the life of me picture someone who looks like that, so I kind of just pictured him looking like the guy from Powder with a Jamie Lannister wig on, which made it difficult to understand why everyone thought he was a mega babe. It just seemed like a way to get out of having a POC hero that actually, you know, had a little color in his skin. I’m half Filipino and half white, which is not dissimilar to some half-Indian skin tones (I get mistaken for being Indian quite a bit actually), and let me tell you what color my skin not comparable to: freaking marble! I understand that quite a few Asian countries, the Philippines included, are fixated on white skin being some kind of beauty standard, but as a romance author, why reinforce that? Why can’t Samir have a little melanin and still be considered handsome? It really irked me. Another thing I hated about Samir, was that he instantly felt the need to protect Mili, punch any guy who looked at her, and, oh yeah, he totally lied to her right off the start and caused a lot of the drama that occurred later on with this idiotic lie. Instead of explaining who he was and how he knew her right off the bat, he pretended to be some random boy whose family was from her village, gained her trust, and just kept up this act pretty much for the entire book. Meanwhile, his ‘manliness’ just made me roll my eyes: the constant references to him being a big, manly man with size fourteen feet and Mili being so petite with her size four feet she can barely walk around like a normal human being, were just more than I could take. There was even an instance where he can’t even say the word ‘gay’, as if he is afraid that will somehow push him over into the gay spectrum.
Suffice it to say, this book just did not speak to me. I dislike the whitewashing of the hero, women being shamed for their sexuality, hetero normative manliness prowling around, and relationships built on a false premise. Whenever there was a moment that I enjoyed or a character interaction that helped me warm up to the story, something completely misogynist would occur. Clearly, this was just not the romance for me. I do think Sonali Dev is a good writer, however, and I hope that maybe her subsequent books after this one are more up my alley, because I have heard good things about them.
