We have reached the fateful day – it’s time to talk about The Bollywood Bride by Sonali Dev. Its perhaps an open secret around these parts that we haven’t found too much to love about this book. So, let’s dig in and talk about the whys and how’s with this book, and some larger thematic conversations as well.
Let’s start with a few ground rules:
- Since we’re anticipating lots of conversation, please try your best to reply directly to each other, that way they are alerted and can keep discussing!
- Discussing is the important word. Let’s have a conversation so try to keep the thoughts flowing and give your fellow readers something to respond to.
- Please reference the topic number you are responding to (if you are) so other Book Clubbers can hunt up the topics they want to discuss with you.
- Not that I’m expecting to need to, but be warned that I retain the right to delete any comments which go beyond the normal civil banter we have here at Cannonball Read. Consider yourselves warned.
There are also some additional topics that I’ll be putting up over at our Facebook Group, Cannonball Read Book Chat, throughout the course of the afternoon if you feel like chatting there as well. The guidelines above are in effect there as well.
Here are our topics to begin our conversation:
- This novel explores the idea that self-sacrifice is in many ways the coward’s way out, a running away not only from one’s problems, but from one’s true self. What are your thoughts about the ‘hard work’ of staying versus the ‘easy’ choice of running in both Vikram and Ria?
- Mental illness, and its stigma across cultures, plays a large role in this book. What do you think about its overall impact on the narrative? What are some examples of books which handled this particularly well, or poorly?
- Dev illustrates the so-called bubble of immigrant life in The Bollywood Bride. How does this affect the story she is attempting to tell?
- Can a relationship that didn’t work the first time, work the second? Does the book give us enough evidence to make an argument for either side?
- In her professional career Ria had been typecast as the ingénue bride. How does this roll over into other aspects of her life?
- Layering of the past across the present through flashbacks is a standard technique. How does the execution of techniques and tropes affect your enjoyment of a novel?
- Which of your favorite Romantic Novel enjoyable features (witty banter, smoldering, etc.) was missing from The Bollywood Bride?
- What’s your take on the importance of reading about non-dominant cultures?
Or just tell us how you feel about the book. Remember, this is the first of FOUR Book Club Reads this year, we will be voting in April for our Science Fiction Read, so head over to the Cannonball Read Book Chat to tell me your suggestions since we will be out of my comfort zone.
Okay, Cannonballers – have at it!
#8 – my favorite parts of the book are the ones that push me outside of my own culture. I was perhaps most excited to read about the culture of weddings. My own sister is in the midst of planning her wedding, and I’m finding the traditions we choose to keep or move beyond are incredibly interesting. Which made me so angry when reading this and our main characters go to a broom closet for the majority of the fun parts of the wedding ceremony!
I know! That scene made me so mad. Instead of feeling like it showed how much they loved each other, and how passionate they were, it felt like they were very selfish. And considering that Ria wanted to keep it secret, their actions all felt very attention attracting and obvious! (I’ll try to check in on FB, but my work computer just now decided not to connect!)
So very frustrating. I felt the scene earlier in the book when Ria and Vikram were picking out the wedding readings was maybe the first time I connected the characters (and I thought it was really interesting). I very nearly stopped reading entirely when I was denied the wedding.
We actually get the most important part of the wedding. I attended a friend’s wedding in India about 20 years ago. The only parts the guests paid attention to were the entrance of the bride and groom and the exchange of garlands – the part where they are separated by a cloth, the priest speaks and the guests sprinkle them with grains of rice. Other than that, everyone was talking, eating, drinking tea, coming and going. Occasionally a family member would participate in something and then other family members would yell at them. The book shows us the parts to which most of the guests would be paying attention.
Still…DON’T GO TO POUND TOWN DURING SOMEONE ELSE’S WEDDING CEREMONY. It’s rude. Miss Manners would never.
My favourite parts of the whole book were probably the cultural differences in planning and preparing the wedding, such as Ria and Vikram picking out the wedding readings, Ria helping Jen with her sari, picking out the wedding outfits for the guys. I also loved everything about the aunties and the lively environment surrounding the wedding preparations. That made it even worse that Ria and Vikram acted the way they did at the wedding.
Considering it seemed to me that both Ria and Vikram were an important part of the actual wedding party (I pictured them almost as attendants, maid of honour/best man), it seemed very strange to me that they could just disappear and make out for the majority of the ceremony. Once again, it emphasised how self-involved they both were, not able to put their own business aside while people who were hugely important to them were getting MARRIED. It’s not like this was some insignificant family get-together. A person they both loved like a brother was having his big day, but they were too caught up in their own drama to care about what their actions might mean to others.
I originally voted for this book specifically because I wanted it to push me outside of my own culture. That’s what I wanted more of in this book.
I wanted to know more about the two weeks of parties and rituals leading up to the wedding ceremony.
I wanted to know more about the food and the clothes and the vows.
I wanted to know what kind of hotel lets you have a fire pit burning in the middle of a ballroom.
I was disappointed by the choice to go and get busy in a broom closet instead of sticking around for the ceremony. I get that four hours is a long time to pine, but come on. And then just leave town without saying good bye? These decisions made me crazy.
Fun fact: I worked in Mumbai for a while back in 2000, and a coworker of mine was getting married while I was there. I was so excited to go to an Indian wedding and got all carried away dreaming about outfits and food…only to find out that they were both Catholic and that the wedding would be exactly like every single other one I have ever been to. I felt cheated then and I feel cheated now!
I originally voted for this book specifically because I wanted it to push me outside of my own culture. That’s what I wanted more of in this book.
Me too. Romance is a genre that lends itself very well, I believe, to encouraging diversity in reading selections, because the themes of love and character development as individuals and pairs are universal. If there is detail available that educates me on other aspects of cultures unfamiliar to my own, that is the cherry on top!
Personally, while I was disappointed that there wasn’t more detail about the wedding, as someone who hasn’t had the opportunity to attend an Indian wedding, I also am hesitant to take Dev to task for not including all of it. I don’t want “I wish there was more!” to become “This is an Indian book so you MUST have the Indian ceremony from start to finish.”
Have you read Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake? She describes a traditional Bengali wedding, and it is gorgeous. The novel itself is stunning and devastating. It’s not a romance, but it is beautifully written, and the male protagonist is much more sympathetic than Vikram.
And not even during the reception. During the actual wedding ceremony! Granted, it’s a long ceremony. I was like, guys. Come on.
3 and 8 – I found the environment of Bollywood Bride so rich and likable that it both engaged me more in Ria and Vikram’s relationship, but also made me feel more frustrated by them individually and as a couple. I liked them better because the lovely secondary and tertiary characters liked them, but I wanted them to be better.
#3 was interesting to me, as well, and was in fact the reason that I was intrigued by this novel. I wanted to know MORE about the hybridity of experience that the family underwent in moving to America, as well as Ria’s own sense of identity as both Bollywood Star and member of an extended Indian-American family.
Topic 4 – I think topic number 4 relates quite a bit to some of the concerns/issues I had with the novel. I definitely think that on some occasions, a relationship that didn’t work can work at a later time. This is especially the case in this type of scenario – Ria and Vikram didn’t break up because there was anything wrong with the relationship, they broke up because Ria wanted to protect him from her past. By revealing her secrets, there is space for the relationship to pick up again. The idea of a relationship working after the characters after matured and had time apart has certainly been seen in other romance novel and romantic stories (Persuasion and The Legend of Lyon Redmond are the first that spring to mind) but it worked for me more in those stories, and I think that has very much to do with Ria. While it is hard to judge Ria’s day to day life when she is returning to what she considers home and is surrounded by old family and friends, it is hard not to feel like she hasn’t put her life on hold for the past ten years. She is a world famous movie star, but all we as readers hear about is how she hates the attention, and she doesn’t seem to enjoy any of the perks. She wears nice clothes because her designer gives them to her but doesn’t seem to care too much either way (the most excited she gets about clothes is when she borrow her aunt’s sari), she enjoys eating her aunt’s food, but I very much got the impression that Ria wasn’t using her fame and fortune to travel, to enjoy good food, to have fun shopping. Vikram still knows how she takes her coffee afer 10 years – while some people become very set early on, I didn’t even drink coffee ten years ago so the fact that Vikram is so easily able to determine her likes and tastes felt more like stagnation on Ria’s part rather than romance. It seems like the last ten years have all just been about her responsibilities and a job she did to pay for her mother’s upkeep but didn’t enjoy. It also made me so sad for her when I realized that she had only slept with Vikram as a teenager, and then the actor that abused her, though that one was more understandable – given her fear of passing on her illness, I understood why she would avoid intimate relationships, even if it is depressing that her last sexual experience was horrible. So the thing that really bugged me is that even as Ria becomes successful, rich and famous, she doesn’t seem to have any joy in her life for ten years, especially since she has partially cut herself off from her family and home in order to avoid Vikram. Even with Vikram as the love of her life, I wish she had found some level of contentment in those ten years that his return made better, rather than being an empty shell until he came back into her life. I tried to think of novels that did a better job of showing that the heroine’s first love was the one for her while also having let her live her life without him, and since I mainly read historical romances, it was hard. With the examples I mentioned earlier, it’s not as if Anne Wentworth or Olivia Eversea did too much with their lives between breaking up with Captain Wentworth and Lyon Redmond when they were young, but both matured by the time they met again, and in their defense, they didn’t have many options given their time frame. It’s not as if Olivia and Anne could have traveled the world because they were women in the 19th century, so they were somewhat stuck in their situations (even if Olivia continued to be very active as an abolitionist and had her causes to devote herself to). Ria, however, even with all her fears of intimacy and her guilt, could have at least at some type of life, even if it wasn’t perfect.
An interesting recent example that I think somewhat fits what you’re talking about re: the heroine having a life after the hero dumps her the first time was “Lord Dashwood Missed Out” by Tessa Dare. The novella wasn’t 100% successful, but the heroine writes a successful pamphlet and travels around England giving talks to other young women. In general, we’re meant to believe that while she does still hold the candle for the hero, she dusted herself and moved on as best she could.
Oh yes, while I had quite a few quibbles with that novella, and was a bit disappointed with it overall, I’m so glad that Nora hadn’t just been sitting at home, crying into her embroidery (or whatever young ladies got up to then), pining for the hero. She was heart-broken, but she got on with her life and made something of herself. She seemed fairly content without him, not as if her entire life was put on hold once Dash left.
I agree that it’s deeply sad that Ria really hadn’t enjoyed any aspect of her life for the last decade. It’s quite clear that while Vikram was gutted for a while and had a bit of a walkabout trying to get over her and find some purpose to his life, he also managed to get a whole load accomplished. Ria just gritted her teeth and made movies to make money enough to support her mother’s hospital bills, isolating herself from her loved ones and the world, never allowing herself a second’s joy. It seemed like she deemed herself undeserving of anything positive because she was forced into the movie career after the promise to her father. Because she had to break up with Vikram for his own good, she was never to experience any fun or anything enjoyable ever again.
That’s my main reason for being unsure about whether Ria and Vikram can truly have a HEA. Not because they were split up, but because there are so many things that Ria needs to address about herself – learning to accept herself fully, letting herself be loved, allowing herself enjoyment in everyday things. Then there’s the spectre of her possibly impending mental breakdown, her fear of intimacy because she doesn’t want to ever have children – the list goes on. Woman is in too much of a bad place for them to ever really have a healthy relationship.
Good points about Vikram. As heartbroken as he was, he still found fulfillment in other aspects of his life, while I felt Ria was still that 18 year old girl in so many ways.
I also think you made a good point about the HEA, but at least I’m hoping that Vikram’s acceptance and love will finally let Ria accept herself, and grow up. Maybe they aren’t meant to be, but by starting over, maybe they can both allow their relationship to naturally develop and progress or end in a way they didn’t before. Since Vikram can forgive her for her actions of ten years ago, maybe she finally will as well, since it seemed like one of the reasons she denied herself any pleasure is because she felt so much guilt about the pain she caused him.
I was also hoping that maybe it is just the circumstances of the novel, and that maybe Ria does have some type of fun in her life, but when she is back in India, her best friend seems to be her maid. She didn’t only cut herself off from romantic relationships, she cut herself off from all human relationships that weren’t strictly work related.
That’s how I felt at the end of the novel. I wasn’t sure that they would be together forever, but more that Ria had unpaused her life.
You have to have some deep, underlying issues to be able to cut yourself off like that. And her mental issues were barely addressed. She’s going to need some serious therapy, even after their HEA.
The disassociating really concerned me. I understand it is a response for self-protection, but I agree that she clearly needs significant therapy.
Good example! I had forgotten about that one. I kept thinking of Beth Harbison’s Always Something There to Remind Me, where the main character still remembers her high school boyfriend and he remains the “what if” guy, but after their break up she has a child, a career, and is about to be engaged to someone else when she decides she wants to know whatever happened to the guy she left behind.
2. I was honestly worried that it may just be my very Western attitudes towards mental health care that made me so incredibly frustrated with Ria and the way the whole situation with her mother was dealt with. I can understand that she didn’t feel the need to have open interviews with the press about her mother’s horrible illness or the fact that she was a danger to herself and others, but I couldn’t understand what was so bad about confiding in, say, her aunt and uncle (who seemed aware of the situation anyway) and/or Nikhil and Jen, even if she wanted it kept from Vikram. Besides, it seems like her mother’s mental illness was well-known enough that Vikram’s shrew of a mother could use it as leverage to get Ria to stay away from her son.
Again, I don’t think she needed to be publicly open about seeing doctors and mental health experts, but if you’re that convinced that you’re a ticking time bomb and you’re probably going to have a major psychotic break at any moment – don’t you want to be absolutely 100% sure. Don’t you want the finest doctors available to diagnose you?
I freely admit that growing up where I have, living the life I’ve lived, I just don’t understand why getting professional help, as well as support from loved ones in such a difficult situation as Ria was in was impossible. Why she had to carry this burden all by her lonesome. It made me even more frustrated with her.
Agreed re: Western sensitivities and trying not to judge too harshly. What bothered me the most with the whole issue of Ria’s matrilineal mental health was what you alluded to, that it was an open secret within the family, but not so much that Ria could ever talk honestly with Vikram about it. This just seemed like a plot inconsistency leveraged to create dramatic tension.
When we finally found out more about Ria and her mom, and how she didn’t even know about her mom until she was seven, my first reaction was, “oh, look, it’s a madwoman in the attic situation.”
Agreed with you and alwaysanswerb – I was surprised how little the rest of the family knew about Ria’s home life. I understand that Nikhil and Vikram wouldn’t have been in the loop when Ria was younger, but it seems like they at one point would have figured out that Ria had some family issues, even if they didn’t know the extent. I mean, you don’t have a 7 year old girl who doesn’t talk just show up for no reason … and since Vikram was already 10 at this point, he should have picked up a bit more?
I also didn’t want to judge too harshly, but I was surprised as well that Ria didn’t speak to someone – her agent would have been able to help her hide a therapist, and since she is in Bollywood, they might have even been able to spin it as the fashionable thing to do, and not because she had real concerns.
This is central to my problem with the book. I don’t think Dev spent enough thinking through the character’s actions and motivations.
As much time as Ria spent in America, I find it highly unlikely that her aversion to seeking mental help can simply be written off as an example of the cultural divide between east and west.
It simply doesn’t make sense that her family, those who have been closest to her and have known her since she was a child, would be completely out of the loop.
It seems more a contrivance to create tension between Vikram and Ria.
#1 — I can’t be unbiased about the issue of self-martyrdom and whether that’s brave/cowardly because while romance is largely a genre of fantasy, I also can’t separate my own relationship sensibilities and my ideas of what makes a healthy relationship from my enjoyment of reading about a couple. My ideal relationship doesn’t involve histrionics. Couples with mental illness between them need to provide stability, support, comfort, and safety for each other. If one person starts “running away,” the other person needs to be willing to help them through whatever is causing that impulse without also taking it personally and lashing out. In my view, it wasn’t until the last chapter that Ria and Vikram approached anything close to honesty and feasibility as a couple, and by that point, I had mostly checked out from caring.
I understand that a story requires dramatic tension, and that a couple with zero problems from start to finish is probably inherently unexciting, but there also needs to be a hook that leads me to root for them throughout the duration of their problems. Like Malin said above, Ria needs to do a lot of work on herself, and I don’t buy into the trope that someone can be “fixed” by a relationship. Therefore, even if she stops running by the end, I don’t have complete confidence that she wouldn’t do something like that again. There is no pattern of stability established.
This is especially problematic, for me, given much of Vikram’s behavior early in the book. Flaunting a new beau is something that a lot of spiteful people do outside of fictionland, so I get where that comes from, but in a romantic story I found it very gauche. I also had trouble pinpointing the impetus for his turnaround, what made him go from acting like a pig to being completely devoted to Ria again. It kind of just seemed like he had an erection lasting longer than eight hours, so instead of calling his doctor, he broke up with his girlfriend and went back to Ria. And okay, you will almost never hear me complain about sex in a romance, but this book is SO FULL of emotional issues and trauma. Sexual healing is satisfying but ultimately can’t be the only solution, and it’s kind of presented as the panacea here.
Yes, it was hard to see anything redeeming about Vikram early on. Besides the flaunting, it bugged me how he used Mira since she had no idea about the situation and that Ria was an ex-girlfriend (or The Ex-girlfriend). There was so much secrecy in the book too, beyond just Ria’s home life. I didn’t realize this till halfway through the book, at which point it explained why people didn’t see any issues with Ria and Vikram hanging out (I knew no one else knew the details of their break up), but Ria and Vikram kept their relationship secret when they were kids, and then Nikhil didn’t seem to mention it to Jen, leading to all kinds of awkward situations that could have been completely avoided. Because for the most part, having Vikram and Ria forced together just led to tense, uncomfortable scenes rather than seeing why they had a spark.
I thought thematically Dev was onto something with her workings towards self sacrifice being cowardly, but with so much (seemingly unneccessary) drama I just couldn’t follow the throughline into greater depth.
You do?
That seems like the kind of logic that can only be supported with conveniently anecdotal lines of evidence. And it sounds suspiciously Ayn Randian to me.
If you’re abandoning a relationship because you’re afraid of the harm you can do someone, yeah. You’re a coward. But I don’t see that as self-sacrificing. I see it as selfish.
Ouch. Ayn Rand. Maybe I didn’t express my thought well. I am hopped up on sinus meds at the moment. :)
I think putting characters into a place where the reader is questioning motivations is good. Particularly with self-sacrifice because that is a trigger for many women. “If I put myself last, I am doing better by everyone else.” Its certainly not a healthy mindset, but at times prevalent.
So when alwaysanswerb said “If one person starts “running away,” the other person needs to be willing to help them through whatever is causing that impulse without also taking it personally and lashing out.” I agree with her, and wish that Dev had approached that instead of what we actually got on the page.
I get what you’re saying, Katie. She thinks of her sacrifice as being for his own good, and truly believes that’s her motivation, but deep down it’s mainly a fear to actually deal with her problems. I definitely think Dev could have emphasized that a ton more and the book would have been better for it. Because, again, that would have featured Ria actually dealing with her problems.
Last year, I read Dev’s A Bollywood Affair based on the NPR recommendations list (Pop Culture Happy Hour: The Romance Novel Special) and looking for a change of pace. It was generally enjoyable, but forgettable.
I confess and apologise, but I didn’t get through The Bollywood Bride. I got about a third of the way in and then skipped toward the ending because portentous hints of trauma and mute pain wear me down. I could tell a lot of MAJOR stuff was coming and it felt a bit like Jennifer Ashley’s Mackenzie series in which the negative elements of the characters’ backstory are so completely horrifying as to be histrionic and detract from whatever positive effect is resulting from the other sincere and well wrought elements. I found myself wandering off to read other things and coming back to The Bollywood Bride out of obligation rather than interest.
2. Besides the fact that I felt this book was overstuffed with, well, STUFF, my biggest problem was the way mental health issues (and other big concerns, like what was essentially a rape–even if there was technically consent between Ria and the actor, she clearly didn’t want to be doing it) were treated. I didn’t like the way it was all background. None of it was ever explored in any way. It was just used as background drama, and thus that’s the way it seems to have come off to all of us. Like, even if Dev didn’t mean to trivialize the importance of those events, it happened anyway, because the focus is on what those actions did to Ria and Vikram’s relationship, not on why they occurred or how Ria works to fix them. Like alwaysanswerb noted above, Vikram’s love seemed to be the answer to all of Ria’s problems, and that bothered me.
Also, all the other trauma that Ria suffered: her mother’s attack, her father’s murder by her mother, her mother being locked up in a mental institution, her experiences with sexism in the industry, etc. All those traumas were ignored and undercut by the narrative.
I really and truly felt like we were reading suffering for sufferings sake.
Agreed. Everything was thrown in as if it were simply an obstacle to being with Vikram, not as if it were anything that a human person would have an understandably hard time dealing with. I’ve tried not to be too hard on Ria personally when I am discussing all of this because she has been through two lifetimes of trauma in, like, 30 years. But the way the story is written makes it hard not to come down on her, because instead of allowing her to work through those tremendous piles of shit, everything is framed as a barrier she’s artificially throwing up to her HEA. Vikram cooing to hear at the end about how everything is going to be all right reinforces this.
*her. Cooing to her.