Name: Recipe for Persuasion
Rating: 4.14 (7 reviews)

Packs A Ton Into Final Moments. The first 90% of this book is solid. Lots of drama over all kinds of secrets and misunderstandings, primarily between a couple that split over a decade ago and finds themselves thrust together when one of them decides to force their way into the other's life. But also lots of intergenerational drama between a mother and her daughter. But then that last 10% or so of the book... wow. If you like the various cooking reality shows, you're going to like this book from that angle, but there really is so much more here. Solid use of the old English source material (Jane Austen) brought into more modern contexts and even a much different specific cultural background... and then bringing even that background into yet another more modern setting. Long at nearly 500 pages, but never overly feels it. Very much recommended.

Content warnings: marital rape, forced marriage, verbal abuse of a child, MC witnesses dad’s suicide (before book, but described multiple times on page), panic attacks (on page), depression, PTSD, alcoholism (MC’s father was an alcoholic), chronic pain (due to soccer injury and surgery)

While I had my issues with the first Raje family book, most of it had to do with the handling of Emma’s medical issues, so I was hoping for, well, less Trisha in this book. Plus, since this is a Persuasion retelling, it has my favorite trope – second chance romance. Whatever the reasons, I liked this book better than the first, though I still had some issues.

Once one of the hottest restaurants in Palo Alto under her father’s ownership, Curried Dreams is now a sad and rundown remnant of its former self. Ashna, still struggling with her grief over her father’s death and now her mother’s sudden decision to come back into her life, not to mention how to keep the restaurant afloat. When her cousins pressure her to join a reality TV cooking competition, it seems like it may be her only hope for saving the restaurant. Rico is coming to terms with his career-ending injury when a friend’s bachelor party makes him realize that he’s still hung up on his high school first love – Ashna. Convinced that only closure with her will allow him to move forward with his romantic life, he finagles his way into the same TV show. When their reunion becomes a viral video, it seems like they might have a chance. But can they rid themselves of enough of their past baggage to see if they can have a future together?

“It might be time to stop believing the thing that’s easiest to believe.”

I waffled back and forth over calling this a romance. While Ashna and Rico are the main characters, there’s simply too much else going on that pulls the focus from their relationship. For instance, for the first ten chapters, the POV is balanced between Ashna and Rico, and then suddenly we switch to Shobi, Ashna’s absent mom. I enjoyed exploring Shobi’s own experiences with second chance love and contrasting and comparing it to Ashna’s experiences, at times more than I enjoyed Ashna’s. One of the things I didn’t like about the previous book was that every character had a wildly tragic soap opera-style backstory, whether it was a plane crash or abuse. I can’t speak for other readers, but that degree of tragedy doesn’t exactly spell romcom to me. That’s still true in this book, but it felt more integrated into the story this time. I also enjoyed the cooking competition portions, though I wish there had been more to it.

“What? I might have found someone to melt through the famous Ashna Raje ice.”
The problem wasn’t the melting. All it took was for them to be in the same room and there were puddles all over the place, not a sliver of ice in sight. The problem was the ghosts of their pasts, and how much those ghosts had altered them both. The problem was finding each other around the ghosts, melted or otherwise.”

Both Ashna and Rico are laboring under a lot of emotional baggage, and their mistaken understandings of the events that led to their breakup are the least of it. For Ashna, despite her training, whenever she tries to cook anything that isn’t one of her Baba’s recipes, she has a panic attack. It doesn’t take a psychologist to link that back to her turbulent home environment with an alcoholic father and a mostly absent mother. Rico had his own trauma, with being ripped from his home and sent to live with an aunt after his parents died in a car crash. Their relationship as teenagers is mainly based on seeing each other clearly, even if they keep it a secret from those around them. Their reconnection as adults, or at least as much of it as we get in between all the other family drama, is piercingly bittersweet. I would’ve loved to have more time devoted to it, because what was there was enthralling. As for everything else, I wasn’t completely happy with the resolution, either Ashna’s reconciliation with her mother or her choice to embrace cooking.

Overall, I thought this was a dramatic and interesting take on Persuasion, if not the romance I was looking for. I’d give this 3.5 stars and recommend to anyone looking for a heartwrenching multicultural drama.

I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Recipe for Persuasion: A Novel (Rajes Series, #2)

by Sonali Dev

Recipe for Persuasion: A Novel (Rajes Series, #2)

by Sonali Dev

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