Content warning: A secondary character is a survivor of domestic violence. Also, the hero makes a living downsizing companies and firing people, which Catherine thinks ought to count as a trigger in this day and age, and makes Sneezy consider the merits of expressing herself with a flamethrower.

The Marriage Game is a romantic comedy set in the Indian-American community in San Francisco, and it has an amazing sense of atmosphere and family. It’s also very, very funny. But there were also some things that could have been handled better, and since Catherine and Sneezy were both very full of opinions and of flailing, we decided to write this review together.

Layla Patel has returned home to stay with her family and re-set her life, after her breakup with her boyfriend went viral and cost her her apartment and her job. She still wants to get married one day, but has more or less decided that love isn’t for her. Her father helpfully offers her the office upstairs, above the family’s restaurant, in which to restart her business. True, he has just sub-let it to another tenant, but that tenant hasn’t moved in yet, and he is sure the man will understand that family has to come first. Alas, Layla’s father then has a heart attack (he’s fine! But he is in hospital for most of the book), and informing the tenant-to-be of the changes in circumstance is the last thing on his mind. So when Layla goes to take possession of her office, Sam Mehta is already there, and he is not happy to see her.

Sam is the CEO of a corporate downsizing company, and is one giant ball of Issues. He originally trained as a surgeon, and when his parents arranged a match between his sister and his mentor, Ranjeet (the two sets of parents set up a meeting between the prospective couple, and Nisha and Ranjeet hit it off and decided to marry), he was delighted. Only Ranjeet turned out to be an abuser with an alcohol problem, and his sister wound up divorced, broke, and in a wheelchair, while the hospital where Sam and Ranjeet worked covered up Ranjeet’s crime and painted Nisha as a madwoman. Sam feels intense guilt for not seeing through his mentor’s façade, and is immensely overprotective of Nisha as a result (CW for ableism – he feels that her life has been ‘ruined’ because she is in a wheelchair). He is also angry with the culture that made such a marriage possible, and so he avoids everyone in his family other than his sister, and also anything traditionally Indian. And he is determined to take down his former mentor by any means necessary – which means he wants that corporate downsizing contract with the hospital where he once worked, so that he can get his hands on the HR files.

As they are bickering over who has the better claim to the office, some rando shows up for a date with Layla. This is when Sam and Layla realise that Layla’s work life wasn’t the only thing her father neglected to put on hold when he went into hospital. Yes, indeed, Nasir Patel has put Layla’s marriage CV up on a website where Indian families match up their children for marriage, and has begun screening candidates for her. Both Layla and Sam naturally have Feelings about this, and between Layla’s desire to make her father happy when he is trying so hard to do the same for her, and Sam’s guilt at not having sufficiently protected his sister, the upshot is that Layla decides to go on these dates, with Sam as a chaperone of sorts, and they agree the outcome will settle the office ownership question. If she does wind up marrying one of these guys, she will cede the office to Sam. If not, the office is Layla’s.

Catherine: I want to start with some of the things I liked, because there really was a lot that I enjoyed enormously. Layla Patel is a great character and I loved her big, close, loud, sometimes eccentric family. Also, this book was brilliantly funny when it wanted to be. And it was full of lavishly described Indian food and cooking (of which more later), and I am a total sucker for any book that does food well.

Layla’s relationship with Sam is also delightful – full of snark and sarcasm, and Sam has a genuine, if well-hidden, caring streak where Layla is concerned. His chaperonage on the dates degenerates into Sam and Layla sniping and snarking at each other and sort of forgetting that the dates are even there (I especially enjoyed the date with the psychologist who clearly recognised the dynamic early and found it nearly as amusing as I did).

Sneezy: The relationships in this book were high points for me too. There was a wonderful scene where Layla’s dad was patiently teaching Layla how to make dosa, encouraging her to keep trying, that it was okay she was struggling. (And Catherine can’t believe she didn’t mention that, because it was her favourite scene in the whole book.) Of the dates Layla and Sam went on, my favourite was with the maybe-CIA agent. Layla and Sam had an instant chemistry that crackled and snapped from the first moment they met. Sex between Layla and Sam was hot, funny, and sweet, often all at once.

Layla’s creativity in using Sam as her chaperone was one of my favourite ingredients. Depending on the circumstance, having a chaperone in Desi dating isn’t strange, though it’s generally supposed to be a member of one of the dates’ immediate family. Layla completely skews it to her advantage: she protects her mental bandwidth from her overzealous aunties by strong-arming Sam into doing it. This way she could work on getting her life back in order while also giving the candidates her dad picked out for her a chance.

This book also explored long term grief in ways that were really tender. The story touches on how sometimes we hold onto the things and dreams of our loved one, even if it isn’t what we really want, because it feels like a piece of them.

Another poignant moment that really got me is what kicks off the story – the moment when Layla decided to go on the dates her dad picked out for her. While her decision was coloured by her knowledge that arranged marriage can turn out well, it was mainly borne out of love, fear, and self-doubt. For all her strength and snark, Layla had lost a lot of confidence in herself because of what her ex did. Not only was her heart broken, the ramifications of the fallout spilled over into her professional life. On top of losing faith in love and her own abilities to find her partner, she comes home and is confronted with the very real possibility that she might lose her father.

Seeing the amount of time and effort Nasir had poured into finding potential partners for her, craving stability, and wanting to be spared heartache by skipping love, she decides to give these dates a chance. For Layla, her decision also straddled a cultural tension she had and will continue to navigate for the rest of her life. Creating your own path within that tension is something I relate to a lot in my own diaspora experience. This book shows how momentous decisions can be layered with love for family atop fear of loss and uncertainty, and how those decisions are often made while also trying to make sense of one’s own culture. This part of the story made my heart ache in ways I haven’t the words to describe.

I really enjoyed the style of writing, too. It was warm, engaging, and evocative at times with some details that really steeped me into what was happening. However, I hated how some Indian foods and terms were italicized. To me, italicizing non-English words is inherently othering and rings like a tacit permission to gloss over those words and their meanings instead of interacting with them as real words and trying to understand them. In contrast, Jumoke Verissimo wrote a really beautiful piece on this issue, and felt that italicizing Yoruba in her work makes people pay more attention to the Yoruba words, not less. Point is, your mileage will vary depending which side of the fence you’re on, and this book uses italics.

Similarly, I didn’t like how the Indian foods were described by equating them with foods White Americans are expected to be familiar with. It rankles me terribly when there’s Google. Again, how you feel about it may be different.

Catherine: …and indeed I do feel differently about it! For me, the way food was described felt really welcoming – it invited me in to taste something new that still felt like home. And that feels in keeping with the way food was used thematically in this book, where it represents family and love and home and comfort and culture, and is nearly a character in its own right. For me, some of the most emotionally powerful scenes in the book centred around the making, offering, eating, sharing, and rejection of food, and the ways in which the characters interacted with food said a lot about who they were.

Layla has this fabulously joyous, sensual attitude to food – she is almost always snacking on something (donuts and dal!) and I’m not sure we ever see her turn down food that is offered to her – she even seems willing to try her aunt’s horrifying fusion food creations. Layla is open to nurturing and being nurtured, and food is central to that – when she makes food for Sam she is offering a part of herself and when this offering is rejected, or worse, goes unnoticed, it is brutal.

Conversely, we see Sam rejecting Chai tea, snarking about the fancy food in the restaurant they go to on one of Layla’s dates, and snatching one of Layla’s donuts, but the only times we see him enjoying food is when that food comes from Layla. For Sam, food is basically fuel, and this, I think, also represents his alienation from emotion and from the people who love him.

(I want to acknowledge that writers from marginalised communities are often only recognised as writing well when they are writing about food or about the pain of marginalisation, which… well, racism in publishing is not really new news at this point, though it would be REALLY NICE if it was history instead. But to my mind, The Marriage Game actually subverts this trope; food is everywhere in the book, daring the reader to ignore its importance, and while it is described in ways that make me hungry, it also carries immense emotional weight. I think this would be a very different book without it.)

Moving on to the things that we didn’t like so much, I had a huge problem with Sam’s career. I mean, I get that it’s a useful way to potentially get access to the HR files he needs, but I find it very hard to relate to or fall in love with a hero whose job is literally to go into companies, recommend restructures and reductions in staffing, and then help fire people. Just, no.

Sneezy: OOOH BOY, STRAP IN EVERYONE!!! So like Catherine, I haaate downsizing corporations. It would have been grounds to DNF this book if it weren’t for the writing, Layla, her family, and their food. Reading about how carelessly healthcare professionals, hospital staff, and researchers’ livelihoods were tossed aside to keep a company afloat with no examination of the plethora of problems in the American healthcare system that would lead to a healthcare company having a billion dollar deficit infuriated me. It especially didn’t help that there’s a global pandemic going on right now AND FIRING HOSPITAL STAFF AND RESEARCHERS SOUNDS LIKE A REALLY FUCKING BAD IDEA.

The lack of ethics in Sam’s goal to punish Ranjeet is not addressed with any nuance. All of Sam’s decent friends tell him that trying to bring down Ranjeet by pounding him with the Market’s Hammer would be unethical because of his conflicts of interest. Catherine suggested that while it’s fine for Sam to gather evidence of Ranjeet’s transgressions (the greatest hits including abusing staff verbally and emotionally, being drunk on the job, being drunk while performing surgery) Sam just can’t partake in determining what Ranjeet’s consequences should be. Sam’s past relationship with Ranjeet would give Ranjeet too much fire power to sue the hospital over whatever they decide. By recusing himself, Sam would be helping make sure that Ranjeet’s punishment sticks.

It was incredibly aggravating that there was also no discussion of how a downsizing corporation’s restructuring capacity can make hospitals systemically hostile to abusers. You know, the ONE thing a RESTRUCTURING company is good for! Not only was there no mention of this possibility, Sam’s hit list didn’t include all the people in power who protect and enable people like Ranjeet, despite Sam knowing the part they play in upholding a dangerous system. It’s why he got out of medicine in the first place!

A huge point was made of whether Sam was fixated on vengeance against Ranjeet for himself or for Nisha, which is valid. However, he never actually has a conversation with her about it, and we never hear Nisha’s perspective on her own story. Instead, Sam’s moment of reconciliation with his family and culture was a conversation with his dad. The Marriage Game is Sam and Layla’s story, and their thoughts and feelings should be centred. That said, what happened to Nisha is her story, and no one’s feelings on what happened to her should take precedence over hers, not even Sam’s.

And that’s not even getting into all the casually terrible things this book just whizzed by, like domestic abuse and shitty immigration policies. These things happened on the periphery of the story, but I really didn’t appreciate how the story handled what was there. The domestic abuse victim was disregarded completely, and the immigrant was painted as the problem instead of the policies and global systems that shoved that character into the position he’s in.

Catherine: I also found the Dark Moment really hard to take – it was so very, very, ruinously dark, it was at least partly precipitated by Sam, and the fact that it didn’t completely destroy Layla and her family was really down to the fact that Layla’s parents didn’t actually have the priorities she thought they had. There’s a sense of ‘all’s well that ends well’, and I felt as though everyone had been very, very lucky. I’d have liked some more grovelling from Sam, too, though it was satisfying watching him get hauled over the coals (and punched in the face) by his friend.

So how do we grade this? When it was good, it really was very, very good. I liked Sam and Layla together, I adored their banter, and all those dates where the poor guy Layla was supposed to be meeting wound up being the third wheel on Sam and Layla’s lunch date were laugh out loud funny. I really did like seeing Sam’s sister coming into her own and making her own friends and relationships. And I loved the way food was so important to Layla and how it went beyond just being (high quality) food porn into something that expressed the values and emotions of those creating it and eating it.

For me, the core of a romance novel is the main characters and the relationship between them, which I loved – and so for me, Sam’s career choice was actually more of a deal breaker than the poor handling of the abuse subplot, because it felt more central to what made the romance work or not work. I think The Marriage Game gets a C plus from me – my heart enjoyed it, even though my head could see that there are critical flaws. I would definitely read more by Sara Desai.

Sneezy: This is nearly an impossible book to grade for me. I loved the humour, the food, and there were some great poignant moments in here, but there was also ableism, and severe mishandling of really heavy topics. To have so many squee worthy things and DNF flags squished into one book makes for a very frustrating read.

Between the two of us that averages out to a C.