The Shaadi Set-Up

The Shaadi Set-Up by Lillie Vale
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Six years ago, Milan broke up with Rita via voicemail while she was enroute to meet up with him for a European vacation the summer after their sophomore year in college. He shattered her heart, and she hasn't gotten over it in the slightest, despite all her protestations to the contrary. Now Milan is a successful real estate agent...with one exception. He has a house on the market he hasn't been able to sell, and he needs Rita's design help to stage it. Their mothers conspire to set up a meet and manipulate them into working together in the hopes that the reunion will give them a second chance.

What the mothers don't know is that Rita already has a boyfriend, and she isn't interested in giving Milan a second chance. She convinces her boyfriend they should coordinate their profiles on the Desi dating site, MyShaadi.com, so they will match, thereby "proving" they are right for each other. Unsurprisingly, they don't match with each other at all, and soon Rita's boyfriend is dating other women, and Rita is spending all her time fixing up a second home with Milan. However, for a relationship to be successful, the past and present must be reconciled.

I have had a hard time deciding on a rating for this book. I really wanted to like it more than I did. There were some very enjoyable aspects to it but also some aspects that just didn't work for me. I vacillated between two and three stars, for an average of 2.5 stars, which I will round up since half stars aren't an option in Goodreads.

What I enjoyed most about the book was the glimpse into Indian-American culture, much of the banter, and the interactions between Rita and her best friend Rajvee. I also appreciated the steamy foreplay that led into the tasteful fade-to-black sex scenes. And I loved that it was Rita who was the expert with power tools and refurbishing furniture. The story kept me reading and went by pretty quickly.

Overall, though, the book made me grateful I'm not still in my twenties. Ugh. So much angst, so few deep conversations. I just don't understand how it took six whole years for Rita and Milan to uncover the misunderstanding that caused their breakup, given that both maintained contact with Raj. That's a pretty big Best Friend Fail to NEVER talk about such a pivotal event or connect the dots to realize there was more to the story.

I think the love triangle would have been more effective had Neil not been such an obvious mismatch. I wanted to kick him to the curb from the first chapter, and he never changed my mind. SO many things wrong there, including that a relationship should never EVER be based on pheromones alone. It was clear from the very beginning that he would never put Rita first, and she was straining to convince herself everything was fine & he was a good boyfriend. (See above about being grateful to have left my twenties behind.)

One other thing that really bothered me was that it seemed like Rajvee's gender fluidity was an afterthought or a late-in-the-editing process revision because someone said there needed to be an LGBTQIA character somewhere in the book. I was really excited at first when Vale introduced Raj's backstory because books are windows into someone else's experience, and I was looking forward to seeing how that character would develop. But aside from mentioning that Raj feels masculine sometimes and went shopping with Milan in high school for boys' clothes and (theoretically) uses all pronouns, the whole rest of the book depicts Raj as female. In fact, if Vale removed the section of the chapter where Rita recalls the history of Raj and Milan's friendship, I think you would never know Raj was anything but a cisgender woman. That was disappointing to me.

For readers' advisors: story doorway is primary. There is no violence, some swearing. Sex is depicted positively, mentioned regularly, and not described in detail. The main characters are all Indian-American, and most (all?) secondary characters are presumed white.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eBook ARC in exchange for my honest review!

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