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A review by kblincoln
Bollywood and the Beast by Suleikha Snyder
4.0
3.5 stars, actually.
I wanted to like this one so much, it would have taken very little to please me: Bollywood? Beauty & the Beast retelling? Biracial/Bicultural desi heroine who doesn't shy away from calling out racial and cultural issues she's facing as an actress? Love. All of that is exactly my cup of tea.
This book wasn't quite my cup of tea, however. I've been thinking about the problem and I think it has to do with my expectations of how much time we spend with the hero and the heroine together.
In this book, we get a lot of Taj thinking his grumbly, self-hating thoughts, and we get a lot of Rakhee thinking about how she has to prove herself to everyone, but we don't see alot of them together. We don't get alot of excellent banter or experience the falling-in-love parts I enjoy so much because we're stuck in their heads a lot of the time without each other. And also stuck in Taj's brother's head, Ashu, who has some life revelations of his own going on.
I thought I would love the Hindi phrases that are consistently used throughout, but after a while I felt some of them, while adding to the authentic feeling of Bollywood's bilingual culture, was a bit distancing for those of us who don't speak it. Which is weird for me to say because usually I'm all over uses of other languages in American fiction. I think the author could have done a slightly more self-conscious job of "teaching" certain phrases to us.
So there's a lot of emotional trauma, and a few scenes where Taj and Rakhee come together are great, but the overall flow of the story never drew me in, which is a shame, because there's so much here that's good in pieces.
I wanted to like this one so much, it would have taken very little to please me: Bollywood? Beauty & the Beast retelling? Biracial/Bicultural desi heroine who doesn't shy away from calling out racial and cultural issues she's facing as an actress? Love. All of that is exactly my cup of tea.
This book wasn't quite my cup of tea, however. I've been thinking about the problem and I think it has to do with my expectations of how much time we spend with the hero and the heroine together.
In this book, we get a lot of Taj thinking his grumbly, self-hating thoughts, and we get a lot of Rakhee thinking about how she has to prove herself to everyone, but we don't see alot of them together. We don't get alot of excellent banter or experience the falling-in-love parts I enjoy so much because we're stuck in their heads a lot of the time without each other. And also stuck in Taj's brother's head, Ashu, who has some life revelations of his own going on.
I thought I would love the Hindi phrases that are consistently used throughout, but after a while I felt some of them, while adding to the authentic feeling of Bollywood's bilingual culture, was a bit distancing for those of us who don't speak it. Which is weird for me to say because usually I'm all over uses of other languages in American fiction. I think the author could have done a slightly more self-conscious job of "teaching" certain phrases to us.
So there's a lot of emotional trauma, and a few scenes where Taj and Rakhee come together are great, but the overall flow of the story never drew me in, which is a shame, because there's so much here that's good in pieces.