Hate to Want You is a complex novel with a bucketful of family secrets.

The grandfathers of Olivia (Livvy) Kane and Nicholas Chandler were best friends and started a grocery store together that became very successful. Livvy’s was even in a Japanese internment camp during WW II and Nicholas’s didn’t take advantage of that situation. They continued managing it once he was back out.

Livvy and Nicholas grew up together and dated for years, all until a tragic and fatal car accident involving Livvy’s father and Nicholas’s mother. Then, somehow (how was never entirely clear to me), Nicholas’s father bought/cheated the Kanes out of their share of the company. After that, Nicholas and Livvy broke up. They each have a different story about how that went down, however. Livvy left town afterward and hasn’t been back except for a couple exceptions.

It’s been about a decade since the accident and Livvy is back in town. Nicholas goes to visit her at the tattoo parlor she works at in the opening scene. This is breaking all their rules. They’ve been seeing each other once a year (on Livvy’s birthday) for casual sex and Livvy skipped the last one. The sexual tension between them is off the charts the second they’re together. This isn’t a good thing for either of them, really, and just highlights the unhealthy approach they’ve taken to their relationship. Neither of them has really gotten over the other but each of them has reasons to stay away. But with them back in the same town it’s hard to keep them apart. They try to keep it casual, but that’s as unhealthy as it was over the past decade. There’s a lot of work for them to do before they can be together in a meaningful way.

There are many things that set this book apart from other second chance romances. First, one of the characters isn’t white and this is totally normalized, doesn’t even come up as worthy of mentioning. I think the only thing that made it certain to me was the mention of the internment camp. Second, Livvy (and probably her mother) has clinical depression. The way Rai dealt with this was nice—very realistic. She addresses the fact that it’s always there, but the severity of the current state can vary depending on certain triggers. Nicholas also has his own issues even though they’re not as significant as Livvy’s. He’s very closed off mostly because of the way his father has always treated him. He has to learn to overcome that before he and Livvy can really go anywhere. Still before and after that, there’s plenty of sexytimes for the reader to enjoy.

Another thing that sets this book apart is that we get a healthy dose of Rai’s feminist observation:

The world was unkind to women. It was devastating to women who didn’t believe in themselves.

and

The quickest way to get a dude to stop hitting on you was to say you’re with another guy, because men respect other men more than they respect a woman saying no.

If you enjoy complicated romances between characters with lots of painful history, this one might just be for you.

I stumbled across It’s Your Move, Wordfreak! on a list of Indian romances. The book has a lot going for it. It’s a cute premise—Alisha and Aryan meet online playing Scrabble. They really hit it off and decide to go on a semi-blind date. Alisha’s a smart and successful divorce lawyer who’s a little commitment-phobic due to her own parents’ failed marriage. Aryan’s a hot man-about-town who also happens to be a wildly successful architect.

The characters are interesting and likable enough. It’s all a nice setup for the story, but I think the fact that the date is the opening scene is a critical problem. For one, we don’t get to see any of the original courtship, which is a shame. We know from later that their online chats were witty and at times risqué. It would have been fun to see this. Then, the date itself goes very well. She meets his family and they love her. He meets hers and they love him. Etc. There’s basically no conflict at all until about halfway through the book. The seeds of later conflict are set in the first half, sure (Aryan has issues with his father and Alisha has a difficult client). But everything goes swimmingly until a sudden breakup. That’s where things finally really get started.

Once that happened, the book got more compelling because it finally felt like things were happening. (Reading it was kind of an interesting lesson in plotting. Even though lots of ”stuff” happened in the first half, it didn’t feel that way because of the lack of conflict.) The subplots are interesting and get resolved nicely. As I mentioned, the characters are good—they’re compelling and believable and I definitely rooted for them once things started going wrong.

I did have to make some allowances for cultural differences, especially because one of the subplots has to do with domestic violence, and it’s just not handled the same way it would be in the US. Something happens to Alisha at one point and Aryan’s and the others’ reactions were hard for me to stomach. His ultimate response was to sort out the problem with old-fashioned testosterone-fueled violence, with some Indian bribery thrown in for good measure. Still, the novel stayed fairly cute as that was somewhat glossed over.

In summary, this book could easily appeal to fans for English romance set in India (Mumbai to be specific). Just beware a slow start.

I enjoyed Dev’s first three books and was looking forward to this one. It features two minor (but important) characters from A Change of Heart, so I was excited to see their story.

Kimi was confined to a sterile room for most of her childhood. As a result, she doesn’t really have friends—except for the boy who clean bird crap off the side of the house. Rahul lost his father at fourteen and became the man of the house. Kimi’s father is a wealthy ex-Bollywood star and because Rahul’s father died protecting him, he tries to help Rahul’s family out. But Rahul is stubborn and doesn’t like the handouts, so he does work around Kimi’s house (”The Mansion,” as he calls it). 

Their friendship develops over time and although Kimi is clearly in love with him, he’s holding back for some reason. She doesn’t know why and it frustrates her. When the book opens, Kimi has recently had a heart transplant—and professed her love for Rahul and been shot down. But for some reason, a particularly vile gangster who ran a black market of organs from people he had killed has it out for her. As Rahul is a police officer, he ends up protecting her and they get out of Dodge. There’s more to it than escape, but I won’t give that away. Still, it forces them to be together even though Kimi told him to stay away after he rejected her. 

This one is more or less a romantic suspense. But I’m not sure it’s all the way there, partially because of Dev’s chosen narrative style. It’s a little different from her others because it relies much more heavily on flashback in order to show the development of Kimi and Rahul’s early friendship. That may be the reason that the book was slow to get going for me. I read her others fairly quickly, but I was only doing a chapter or two a night with this one until I got about a quarter in. But then it picked up.

Anyone who’s read the others, particularly A Change of Heart, will enjoy this one. You don’t have to have read her others, but I think you’d get more out of it if you have. 

There’s been a fair bit of hype about The Wedding Date. So I went into it wondering if the book would live up to it. I think it does.

The main reason the book was so hyped up is that it features a black heroine and white hero. They’re definitely not the first multiracial couple to people romances, but this is the book that sort of broke through. Probably because it’s good (though I’ve read other good ones too—chalk it up to luck). And it addresses the race issue directly but doesn’t hit you over the head with it. The issues are sort of subtle and cleverly integrated with the plot. Also, I should mention that there aren’t that many romances featuring black heroines, regardless of the race of the hero. So seeing a book like this going mainstream is exciting. I hope it’s the beginning of a trend because I love reading about different kinds of people.

Alexa is chief of staff to Berkeley’s mayor and she has a lofty goal at the beginning of the book: to get a new program for at-risk youth going. She’s got to first convince the mayor and even after that, she’ll have to deal with the council of mostly privileged people. Drew’s goal at the beginning of the book is more mundane: survive the wedding of his ex-girlfriend and work buddy. Awkward. And he’s even in the wedding. Alexa and Drew meet when they get stuck in an elevator at the hotel the wedding party is staying in. Alexa’s heading up to visit her sister with a snack haul, and she and Drew teasingly fight over her cheese and crackers. By the time the power comes back on, Alexa is going to be Drew’s date for the wedding since his bailed.

Their chemistry’s great and it goes where you’d think it might (and good for Alexa—she was due). Neither of them has any intention of making this a long-term thing, but they start up a long-distance relationship anyway, flying back and forth (he’s in LA). Initially they spend time only with each other, but the longer it goes on, the more entrenched in each other’s lives they get. Eventually, Alexa goes to party with Drew at one of his ex-girlfriend’s houses. Alexa, who is “curvaceous,” is intimidated by all the beautiful, thin white women (who are also mostly blonde). I loved that part because I could so relate—I’ve never been one of the beautiful people either.

Race comes up several other times in the course of their relationship. First off, she asks Drew if she’ll be the only black person at the wedding. It hadn’t even occurred to him. Later, she cracks a joke about coffee and skin color and Drew reacts like a lot of white people would—he’s awkward and apologetic. The most significant moment is when they’re discussing the program she’s trying to get started in Berkeley. She has to school Drew on why it’s different when brown kids get up to the same shenanigans white kids get away with, with maybe a slap on the wrist. Not so for the brown kids. Another thing Drew just hadn’t thought of. It’s clear that he’s a good guy at heart, just kind of oblivious of the privilege his whiteness (and maleness and money) has granted him throughout life. The way we know he’s decent is that he listens to Alexa when she explains these things to him, rather than getting defensive. So there’s a lot of serious stuff in there, but there are also plenty of funny and light moments, too.

There was one thing that I found a little lacking in the book: the love scenes. They were basically nonexistent. Well, that’s not quite true—but there were few details. We get a little of the foreplay, but then we get told more or less what happens between one sentence and another. I’m used to a play-by-play. And I miss that because I actually think what they do in the bedroom (or wherever) really does matter to the story. But plenty of people will be more than satisfied with what’s there.

So, if you want a nice contemporary with an interesting storyline involving two smart and successful people, you’ve got it in The Wedding Date.

Although I previously reviewed A Bollywood Affair (the sequel to this one), this is the one I read first. And it really sucked me in, with its troubled characters and their fascinating backstory (they were so angsty that they could have almost fit in in a YA novel).

It starts with Ria, a Bollywood star living in Mumbai, who’s got some kind of past in Chicago that’s hinted at in the first chapter. She also apparently went through a year when she was very young where she didn’t talk at all, until a boy named Vikram charmed her into talking. Of course, he’s the hero.

In the first chapter, she gets a call saying that the cousin she’d basically grown up with in Chicago is getting married and she needs to go “home” for the wedding. She feels the obligation even though it will bring her back into contact with people she betrayed, especially Vikram.

Since she spent most of her childhood effectively being raised by her aunt and uncle in Chicago, Ria does go back for her cousin’s wedding. The wedding and preparations for it take up most of the book and they’re fun because they’re so involved and different from western traditions. Almost all of Ria’s and Vikram’s interactions occur with that as the backdrop. While in Chicago, Ria kind of escapes her identity as a Bollywood star and becomes just one of the family again, though it’s not a complete break. Life in India interferes to cause trouble, which makes for good story.

Watching Ria and Vikram figure out how to come together—Vikram has to learn to forgive her and she has to figure out how to forgive herself, as well as truly come clean about why she left—was great, because there is so much conflict there. Vikram is understandably really pissed off, because when they were young and he thought they would soon get married, she just up and left him without any explanation. He’s still mad and bitter. One thing that made him less likable than he might otherwise have been was that while I definitely got his anger, he should have given Ria the benefit of the doubt, especially as a more mature adult. He should have know that there was a reason she left, even if he couldn’t fathom what it was. But still, he’s believable and it gives him a good flaw.

The book is full of little details that really bring the setting and characters to life. Ria is a great, troubled character who has a lot to overcome. Her backstory is heartbreaking, and although many of the choices she’s made (and makes) maybe aren’t the best, we definitely understand why she makes them. Vikram is also a good character. He dealt with ultimate betrayal and made the best of things. Additionally, the background cast is great, with lots of parents, aunties, uncles and more, all colorful and realistic (also, a little stereotypical at times, but that’s forgivable). Overall, this is an interesting book steeped in Indian culture that western readers will still be able to understand, all while providing a satisfying love story with a believable HEA.