This is a really sweet, feel-good story. Set some time before homosexuality was legalized in India, The Other Man tells the story of Ved Mehra, the wealthy, George Clooney-esque heir to his father’s Mumbai business empire. He goes on dates with women to appease his mom, but secretly meets up with men on Grindr. A messy breakup years ago has cautioned him from trying for anything more than no-strings-attached sex.

Enter Carlos Silva, an American on a business trip to India, who genuinely seems to want to use Grindr to make conversation. Their messages turn increasingly flirty, and even the people in Ved’s life notice how much happier he seems to be. The only problem is that around the same time he met Carlos, Ved had also finally agreed to an arranged marriage with Disha, and preparations are in full swing for their engagement party.

Despite the romantic elements, the story focuses a lot more on Ved’s personal growth, and his journey towards taking charge of his own happiness. While Ved and Carlos definitely engage in cute banter, the sparks are fairly mild, and I finished the book more happy about Ved finally making choices for himself rather than for his family, than about the romantic happily-ever-after.

Carlos was cute and charming, and I like how candid he was with Ved, but I do wish he’d been a bit more understanding of the complications Ved had to deal with. For example, Carlos gets angry that Ved rushes him out of his apartment one morning — Carlos accuses Ved of disrespecting him by not letting him hang around for a shower and breakfast — but the unfortunate reality is that Ved’s father also lives in the apartment, and Ved has many reasons to believe his father wouldn’t be supportive of his sexuality. A major snag for me is that Carlos felt a bit like a manic pixie dream boy — a perfect catch in many ways, yet with little sense of who he actually is / what he actually wants in life.

In contrast, I found Ved’s fiancee Disha a much more complex character. She has her annoying moments — to me, some of the stuff she does to ingratiate herself into Ved’s life and family verge on manipulation — but a lot of her annoyance at how Ved treats her is super understandable. Like him, she’s making the most of a bad situation — she isn’t in love with him either, and she’s still heartbroken over an ex-that-got-away years ago, yet she also feels the weight of family expectations to marry the ‘right’ kind of man. Unlike Ved, however, who often ignores her calls and texts to be with Carlos, she dives right into fulfilling her obligation by planning their engagement party, and in that regard, I found myself sympathizing with her a lot.

That being said, Ved is also very much a sympathetic character. While he does do some things that kinda suck, he’s also very clearly trying his best at balancing what makes him happy with what will make his family happy. True to the story’s overall light tone, the major conflicts get resolved fairly neatly, and everyone gets a version of a happy ending. Part of me wishes there was a bit more of realism in how the various resolutions were handled, but I’m reading this shortly before Christmas, and part of me appreciates how chill and optimistic the story turned out to be.

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Thank you to Thomas Allen Ltd for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pitched as a lighthearted desi take on She’s All That, Sway With Me was significantly more sobering than I expected. There’s a cute and sweet romance, but it’s more a coming-of-age / family story. Arsalan’s really sweet, and I like how he and Beenish helped each other with their respective family situations.

I think, because of all the rather dark themes explored in the story (parental abuse, spousal abuse, horrible abusive men with power, gendered discrimination, forced marriage, etc), my absolute favourite part of this book is Beenish’s friend Diamond. He’s hilarious, and a welcome bit of joy in every scene.

That being said, I think that the romance between Arsalan and Beenish really hit its stride late in the book, when Arsalan realizes Beans’ true motives for asking him to be her dance partner. His insight leads to a deep conversation about their relationships with their respective mothers, and it was a nice realization of how well they’d gotten to understand each other. They also have a lovely conversation about gravity and how opposites not just attract but balance each other out, which is sweet.

I like the other members of their families as well — Nana is a hoot, Aiza Aunty is a star, and Qirat is super relatable. But those stories were a tad more depressing than I expected from a rom com, and scenes featuring Arsalan’s father and Qirat’s fiance can be downright triggering.

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Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

When wealthy philanthropist Dava Shastri learns she has terminal cancer, she decides to die by medically assisted suicide. She plans the procedure for the holidays, when she’ll be surrounded by her children and grandchildren at her remote island home during a snowstorm. She also leaks the news of her death early, so she can see for herself how much good her foundation has done for the world.

Unfortunately, the news is instead dominated by rumours of a long-ago affair with a musician who’d written a song dedicated to her. As Dava faces her final hours, and her children and grandchildren are forced to grapple with their complex feelings around her death and their respective futures, all of them must also deal with the rumours that have surfaced, and with secrets Dava has kept hidden all her life.

There’s much to love about this novel. Dava is a formidable woman — inspired by Rockefeller’s biography, and determined never to be defined as the wife of a powerful man, she tells her husband Arvid straight-up that she aims to take over the world, and she needs a husband who’s satisfied with taking on the role of wife. Arvid readily agrees to let his career take a backseat to hers, and to take a larger role in caring for the kids and the household, and so Dava launches a powerful business empire with charitable foundations that give grants to emerging musicians and to grassroots non-profits that do good for their communities. The story is set in the 2040s, which puts Dava’s flashbacks at our present day, and honestly, if Dava were real, I could see myself reading her business books or signing up for her Masterclass. She’s a badass woman and an inspiration. Any young woman would be lucky to have such a mentor, and the thought of a South Asian woman — especially a dark-skinned one who was once mistaken for her lighter-skinned children’s nanny — reaching such heights in present-day America is absolutely mind-blowing. Yes please, may it be so.

Like many powerful figures, however, Dava is somewhat less successful in her relationships with her children. Some of the most moving, most heartbreaking moments in the novel are the contrasts between Dava’s realizations of where she fell short as a mother — for example, her therapist observing that Dava thinks of her children more as employees than as family — and the beautiful bits of loving memories that sprinkle through — for example, the “free happiness” of Dava and her youngest son singing together in the kitchen. Alongside her children’s resentment at being semi-forced into continuing Dava’s businesses for their careers, is the heart-wrenching realization by Dava herself that she displayed more warmth towards a young woman she’s mentoring whom she’d met as an adult, than towards the young men and women she’d raised from birth.

A more traditional novel would have set the story after Dava’s death. It would also be heartfelt, in that the various children would still have to deal with the loss of their mother, and the fallout of the rumours surrounding her death. But I think it also would have been more lighthearted, and more tied to the soap opera-ish hook of long-held family secrets now come to light.

Ramisetti chooses to set her story in the hours leading up to Dava’s death, and in so doing, casts a pallor of melancholy over the entire affair. This is a beautiful, well-crafted book, but by no means an easy one. I would highly recommend NOT reading it during a vacation or a holiday when you just want to relax. The Shastri-Persson family grapples with inescapable grief the entire time they’re together on Beatrix Island, and the reader has to work through this grief right alongside them. The novel gets slow at times — despite the big mysteries Dava’s family tries to solve about her past, most of the answers are fairly easy to guess for the reader, and as a result, some of the flashbacks and present-day conversations just feel too drawn out.

That being said, the novel really hits its stride maybe about two-thirds of the way through, when Sandi, Dava’s newest daughter-in-law, takes the grandchildren to Dava’s room to spend her final night with her. Dava offers each grandchild — including Sandi as a stand-in for the future grandchild still in her womb — the chance to ask her just one question, which she’ll answer honestly on the condition that the answers never leave the room. Thanks to this plot device, we finally get the truth about the musician and other details related to the alleged affair, but more importantly, the plot device also allows Dava to open up to her grandchildren in a way she’d never quite managed with her own children. It’s a beautiful, cathartic, and heart-wrenching series of chapters that lead us, inevitably, to the end. The scene where Dava takes her last meal, and the grandchildren and children try to find just the right soundtrack for the occasion, just about brought me to tears.

Dava Shastri’s Last Day starts off slow, but it builds up to being an absolute tearjerker of a novel. I’m not sure how I feel about it overall — I think parts could have been tightened, and some repetitions could have been cut out. And ultimately, I just find it too depressing a read to want to put myself through it again. Still, Ramisetti succeeds in creating a memorable character in Dava Shastri, and in taking readers along on a truly emotional ride.

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Thank you to Grand Central Publishing for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.