Recipe for Persuasion

by Sonali Dev

May 26, 2020 · William Morrow Paperbacks

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Content warning: This book has ALL the triggers, and I’m a bit worried I’ve forgotten one, but here goes. Abusive/manipulative/neglectful/controlling parents. Alcoholism. Suicide of a parent (witnessed by the child – off page, but remembered rather vividly). Forced marriage and rape (off-page). Infidelity. Hero is orphaned at an early age and is not acknowledged by his father’s family. Plane crash. People who stress you out just showing up and letting themselves into your apartment to stay. Obviously, PTSD and panic attacks abound, but that seems entirely reasonable, don’t you think?

I’ll be upfront about this: I have absolutely no idea how to review Recipe for Persuasion. But I kind of feel like I need to anyway.

Here is the blurb:

From the author of Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors comes another, clever, deeply layered, and heartwarming romantic comedy that follows in the Jane Austen tradition―this time, with a twist on Persuasion.

Chef Ashna Raje desperately needs a new strategy. How else can she save her beloved restaurant and prove to her estranged, overachieving mother that she isn’t a complete screw up? When she’s asked to join the cast of Cooking with the Stars, the latest hit reality show teaming chefs with celebrities, it seems like just the leap of faith she needs to put her restaurant back on the map. She’s a chef, what’s the worst that could happen?

Rico Silva, that’s what.

Being paired with a celebrity who was her first love, the man who ghosted her at the worst possible time in her life, only proves what Ashna has always believed: leaps of faith are a recipe for disaster.

FIFA winning soccer star Rico Silva isn’t too happy to be paired up with Ashna either. Losing Ashna years ago almost destroyed him. The only silver lining to this bizarre situation is that he can finally prove to Ashna that he’s definitely over her.

But when their catastrophic first meeting goes viral, social media becomes obsessed with their chemistry. The competition on the show is fierce…and so is the simmering desire between Ashna and Rico. Every minute they spend together rekindles feelings that pull them toward their disastrous past. Will letting go again be another recipe for heartbreak―or a recipe for persuasion…?

In Recipe for Persuasion, Sonali Dev once again takes readers on an unforgettable adventure in this fresh, fun, and enchanting romantic comedy.

Now, this blurb is not precisely inaccurate (though in fact, Rico deliberately goes on the show in order to get some closure with Ashna), but if you take a look at that and think, ‘ooh, Jane Austen, cooking show, romantic comedy, own voices, this is just the fun, fluffy romance I need to get me through iso’, you will be in for a nasty shock. I mean, you saw that list of content warnings above. Recipe for Persuasion is many things (including, yes, a rather adept retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion set on a cooking show), but a fluffy romantic comedy it is not.

What it is, is an intelligent, complex story about secrets and family and relationships. The main story takes place in the present, but it is firmly rooted in the events of twelve and of thirty years earlier, and the ways the various characters reacted to them at the time and since. It takes most of the book for us to learn precisely what did happen in the past, though one starts to get an increasingly horrified inkling pretty early on.

In short, Recipe for Persuasion is a good book, but it’s not the book the blurb leads you to expect (and WHY do marketers do this, WHY WHY WHY it can’t possibly help a book in the long run???).

And I don’t want you to think that Recipe for Persuasion is without humour – there are some lovely one-liners and banter as the story progresses, and there is a certain amount of things-going-disastrously-but-humorously-wrong in the context of the cooking show that reminded me of that slightly-slapstick sort of romantic or musical comedy film genre (and I suspect that’s where the rom-com marketing came from), but the overall tone of the book felt pretty dark to me, mostly because of the fact that the inside of Ashna’s head is a pretty distressing place to live.

Anyway, I came for the cooking show and the Austen, and I’m really glad that Carrie gave me the heads up on the triggeriness because yeah, that was a lot. I’ll be honest – I may not be the best person to write this review, because I prefer my stories with a much lower level of angst, and there were a number of themes and threads that I found particularly upsetting.

But I do want the right readers to find this book, and I don’t think they will, with this blurb. And I also want to warn away the readers like me, who are not going to have a good time reading it.

Let’s look at some of the things the book did well.

I’ll start by saying that it’s quite magnetic. Once you are drawn in, the world feels very real and very hard to leave (even if you want to, and there were plenty of times when I did). The family dynamics are particularly well-drawn, if heartbreaking and upsetting on many levels. I absolutely DO NOT recommend this book to anyone who comes from an emotional/dysfunctional family background. There is so much nightmare fuel here, I can’t even begin to express it.

Ashna is pulled in so many different directions, and I really felt for her. Her mother more or less abandoned her for the sake of her career (which is, ironically, about promoting the rights of women and girls in rural India), and she was raised mostly by her aunt, who was wonderful, and by her father, who was an alcoholic. He was also manipulative and abusive as hell, but Ashna doesn’t really see that through the fog of guilt at believing that she caused his suicide, and through her feelings of abandonment by her mother.

Ashna never liked cooking, but has become the owner and head chef at his restaurant largely out of guilt at letting her father down, and she has panic attacks whenever she tries to cook anything that wasn’t on his menu. She is absolutely contained and controlled on the outside, and full of rage and anger and guilt and insecurity and gratitude and love and resentment on the inside. She has warm and loving relationships with her aunt and cousins and extended family – but she also feels as though she is unlovable or has to earn their love by being the person they want her to be, so there are important parts of her life that she keeps secret from them. She goes on the cooking show to help out her cousin and to try to rescue the restaurant, even though she can’t bear to cook in front of people. Ashna resents her mother, and is furious that she has chosen now, after thirty years of neglect, to try to build their relationship.

She is, in short, an absolute snarled up tangle of trauma and tension, and the last thing she needs is for her celebrity partner on the cooking show to turn out to be the boy she loved in school, who abandoned her when she most needed him.

(No, scratch that. The last thing she needs is for her mother to just SHOW UP in her apartment one evening, having just flown in from India, and declare her intention to stay for a month to work out their relationship. This gave me absolute HIVES, guys. I know someone whose ex did this to her as a ‘romantic gesture’ after she broke up with him – thank heavens her flatmate refused to let him in – and I can tell you that this went in precisely the abusive/stalkerish direction you might expect. Ashna’s mother isn’t a stalkery ex boyfriend, but that still stressed me out nearly as much as it stressed out Ashna. Eeeeeeek.)

Naturally, this is not the full story as far as Rico is concerned – he has no idea that her father is even dead, and believes that Ashna was the one who cast him off as not being worthy of her. Rico, however, is in a much better place emotionally than Ashna, though he’s never really managed a relationship that felt like that first one. (There’s kind of a running joke about how he is godfather to all his exes’ children with their new husbands, because they are all super happily married, and he gets on great with them, now that he is no longer trying to be in a romantic relationship with them.)

Rico has been quite successful in life – he moved to England and became a star soccer player and also managed the PR for his team. He has, however, recently suffered a career-ending knee injury, and is at a bit of a loss for what to do next. I have to say, I felt as though his emotional state was less well handled than Ashna’s. He seems to have completely accepted the fact that his career is over, even though the injury is quite recent, and while he is having difficulties figuring out the right pain meds for his knee after the operation, that’s about the extent of his distress over the whole thing. I’m not saying it wasn’t a relief to have someone in this novel who wasn’t a ball of angst at all times, but I did feel as though he had adjusted to his enforced retirement awfully quickly.

Rico holds a lot of anger towards Ashna at the start, which made me a bit nervous, but he does figure out pretty quickly that she is in a bad place, and while he is still angry with her, he is also very quick to support her when she starts having a panic attack on set. His anger becomes anger about what she is doing to herself, and slowly grows into concern and renewed affection.

I did enjoy the relationship between Ashna and Rico. It’s hard, I think, to walk that line between justified anger at a former partner, and being unnecessarily shitty to each other. Ashna hasn’t forgiven Rico for his abandonment, but she is also the one who always notices when his knee is troubling him and makes sure he has a chair. Rico hasn’t forgiven Ashna, either, but he is sensitive to her emotional state and will distract the cameras from her when she starts to panic or just doesn’t have a TV-friendly answer to a question. I liked that they treat each other as humans who are worthy of compassion even when they can’t stand each other.

An interesting choice this book made was to make Ashna’s mother, Shobi, a viewpoint character. This was very necessary, since so much of the story centres around her attempts to restore (create?) her relationship with Ashna, and honestly, if all you had was Ashna’s view of her, it would be hard to make her sympathetic. Shobi has been a terrible mother to Ashna – but her reasons are understandable, even if they are not laudable. Given that Ashna only learns the truth late in the book, I think it would have been really hard to tie that plot thread up in a way that worked emotionally if we hadn’t already seen some of the story through Shobi’s eyes.

Having said that, Shobi’s story really was wrenching, and I spent much of it filled with dread. Which is not an emotion I’m really looking for in a romance novel. And that, in a nutshell, is my difficulty with this book: it is extremely good at evoking emotion and connection with the characters, but the emotions it is evoking – anxiety, anger, insecurity, horror, feeling trapped, dread – are not emotions I want evoked when I’m reading a romance.

I also had a big problem with something that occurred early in the book. We meet, briefly, Ashna’s cousin Esha, who is disabled:

Esha had suffered seizures ever since the plane crash she’d been in when she was eight. The accident had killed the other thirty passengers on the family’s private jet, including Esha’s parents. Esha had been the miraculous sole survivor. No one could explain how that had happened, or why the seizures and visions had started after.

Yes, Esha is clairvoyant. She predicts that the person Ashna is waiting for is almost there. And then she disappears from the rest of the book, her purpose fulfilled.

Look, disability representation in romance is something I would like to see more of. But this isn’t representation. It’s using a disabled character as a plot device. As for the magical part… I’m not ideally qualified to rant properly about the Magical Disabled Person trope in fiction, but others are, and I can link to them. It’s also weirdly out of place in a book that is entirely grounded in real world problems, with no other fantastical elements.

Another disabled character in the book, Yash, is treated far more normally – he is running for office in California and it is only mentioned in passing that they need space for his wheelchair in the audience. This is a much better approach, I think!

I don’t want you to think I hated this book. I loved the cooking show parts – I’m always going to be happy if people are talking about food or cooking in any novel. I liked all the soccer-related parts. I thought that Ashna’s characterisation was stellar, if painful. There were some moments of great humour, which I adored. The Persuasion homage was well handled. And I liked the central romance.

But.

While Persuasion is one of Austen’s bleaker books, full of repression and regret, Recipe for Persuasion is ten pounds of angst in a one pound bag, and for me, it was far too much. I was particularly disappointed by the use of the Magical Disabled Person trope, which, frankly, was pretty egregious and even somewhat offensive, particularly when contrasted with the delicacy with which much harder topics were handled.

I’m giving this a C.