Books Recommended .. or not

Currently reading Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema by Madhu Jain. It's actually really good so far. She talked to a lot of people, got a lot of information, and her book sits the fence perfectly between showcasing the best of times and going into the worst of times. She was very good friends with Shashi, so she got a lot of information from him. It's got chapters on Prithviraj, Raj, Shammi, Shashi, Rishi, Randhir & Ranjiv & Ritu, Karisma & Kareena, and Ranbir, who had just made his Bollywood debut when it came out. I'm only halfway through, but I recommend it to any filmi lover. Fascinating stuff.

I don't think she's kin. She's never mentioned it, whether out of discreetness (an outside source looks less biased...kinda?) or not. I searched the Jains that married into the Kapoor family with her name and I don't see any connection.

I was able to get an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) of The Bollywood Bride by Sonali Dev and read it last week.  Sonali Dev's The Bollywood Affair was my favorite book of last year. I gave away copies for Christmas to my sister and many friends. You always worry if the second book by a favorite author can live up to the love you had for the debut.

I need not have worried. The Bollywood Bride was just as excellent, but very different in tone than her first. The Bollywood Affair is similar to a Rom Com movie, with a meet cute and several comic misunderstandings.  The Bollywood Bride deals with the stigma of mental illness in India.  Ria, the heroine suffers from depression and she has a family heritage of severe mental illness.

The Bollywood Bride is a book full of angst. I cried more reading this book than I think I have, well maybe ever. (I am in an emotional state with a son leaving for college, but this book still packs quite the emotional wallop.) It's that good kind of angst -- and for lovers of Bollywood movies, I can compare it to crying with a watery smile on your lips watching films like Veer-Zaara or Kabhi Khushi Khabie Gham. All I can tell you is have a box of Kleenex handy nearby. I like books that take me on an emotional journey like The Bollywood Bride. Sometimes you're in the mood for some serious angst and some real life reasons for the couple to be apart and it to be absolutely glorious when they finally come together.

Once I got my hands on an advance copy of Bollywood Bride and I devoured it in less than 48 hours -- staying up super late one night reading. It was a very hard book to put down!

Ria is a famous Bollywood actress, and we can see from the start that she lives an isolated life in India -- her nickname is "The Ice Princess". She decides to return to the States for a family wedding after a horrible encounter with a paparazzi photographer. She's threatened with blackmail, and she uses the wedding as an excuse to escape. But going back to the Chicago suburb of Naperville also means unavoidably coming face to face with her young love. The boy she left to start her career in the movies. Ria is incredibly stressed anticipating their encounter and they see each other in the worst possible moment -- when he is in a compromising position with his new girlfriend. Ria is mortified. And Vikram is still filled with anger at the way she left him all those years ago. He taunts her, and says horrible things (I wanted to give him a tight slap more than once!). They're living in the same house for the time leading up to the wedding, and constantly thrown together. I didn't know who was going to snap from the tension between the pair first -- Ria or ME!

We gradually learn why Ria gave up Vikram, because we can tell, and so can Vikram, that she still has so many feelings for him. So. Many. Feelings. She has a good reason to have given him up, a genetic disposition to severe mental illness in her family. The events that led to her giving up Vikram and starting her career in Bollywood are truly horrific. She has good reason to fear ever having a normal future. Ria is terrified that all her secrets will come out.

When Ria and Vikram finally admit they still have feelings for each other -- it was explosive! The level of sexual and emotional tension that Sonali Dev was able to maintain up to that point was extraordinary.

Vikram is truly worthy of Ria. She needs saving. She needs someone in HER corner when her world falls apart, and he comes through. (How could we ever doubt it?) He comes through in spades. One other thing I really did like though is that Ria stands up for herself, too. Vikram's mother had been very cruel to her in the past, and rather than the situation playing out that Vikram defends her -- Ria defends herself and puts her future mother-in-law in her place in one of the most satisfying moments of the book for me.

I can't recommend this book enough. Don't go in expecting it to be just like Bollywood Affair. Like Bollywood Affair, it has three dimensional characters, and a rich world both here in the States and in India -- but it has a very different kind of story to tell. And I loved it! I've heard there are two more books in this series. It's going to be so hard to wait for the next one now!

Sonali Dev just did a podcast with Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches Trashy Books.  She discusses how she read her first romance novel in her thirties and said, "This is just like a Bollywood movie!"  She discusses her favorite Bollywood films, and used clips of some films to talk about romance at a recent writers workshop for romance authors.

THE FISHING FLEET: Husband-Hunting in the Raj
by Anne De Courcy (who also wrote "The Viceroy's Daughters" [Curzon's])

So many young British men went to India,
first to serve John E I Company,
then to govern the country,
that there were too few left for Englishwomen to find enough husbands.

So what is a marriage-able Englishwoman (fewer Scots or Irish than among the men) to do?
Enough such women got onto ships heading for India,
that they were given a name: the "Fishing Fleet." It was British husbands that they were "fishing" for.

De Courcy has found diaries and memoirs of many such women, and even a survivor to interview.
She also found material by the men they married, and their own kin.
TFF refers to women from the entire time the Brits were in India,
but it concentrates on the last century+, 1820-1947.

Also discussed (pun intended) were the children of those marriages,
who were sent "home" to be educated (in being English, mostly).
Many of those children returned to India when they grew up,
the boys to serve the Raj, while the girls followed their mothers into what was still called The Fishing Fleet.

I deem this book to be worth a look if you happen to come across it,
although not necessarily worth tracking down.

Dancelover

Any of you enjoy reading YA books? I read this one recently and liked it a lot. It's a fun, fast read, with lots of action. Not usually my favorite type of thing, actually, but I got into this one. The idea is kind of along the lines of "what if your fitbit was actually in charge of your life?" Everyone in the books wears a device that alerts them when their heartbeat gets too high, because if it goes over a certain level they will die. "Better safe than sorry, better calm than dead" (or something like that) is the mantra. But the main character thinks it's a ruse to control people, and devises a way to test his theory, which... goes awry.

Whoah! Super creepy!

... it begins?