"Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors" by Sonali Dev

Well, this was a roller coaster.  I actually had to put it down for a couple days because it was making me too tense!  Wow.  Been a while since I had a book do that.

Yes, this is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.  Yes, it's set in the modern day, and it does a gender-swap on many of the characters, which was neat.  And yes, it was a lot more emotionally intense than I was expecting.

Indian-American neurosurgeon Trisha Raje can't stand DJ Caine, the brother of one of her patients AND the talented chef who is catering Trisha's brother's fundraising events.  Her brother is making a bid for the governorship of California.  DJ's sister Emma is about to die of a brain tumor that Trisha can remove, but only at the expense of Emma's sight.  Emma is an artist and is convinced she can't live without her sight.  DJ is convinced Trisha is an entitled jerk.  Trisha is convinced DJ is a judgmental jerk.  You see where this is going.

What made it all so extremely tense is Julia Wickham, formerly Trisha's college roommate, now trying to get revenge on all of Trisha's family and using DJ and Emma to do it.  She makes Mr. Wickham from P&P look like a nice guy, y'all.  I fear manipulative people like her, and she was so scary-real I had to take a break from reading.  But I did pick it up and finish it, never fear.

All the descriptions of food made me very hungry while reading this, even though I don't have a lot of experience with Indian food, so I just had to kind of imagine a lot of what the food discussed must have tasted like.  I really liked the characters and how the story ended, and the writing was very engaging.

(From my Instagram)

Particularly Good Bits:

"Guilt is a waste of time.  The fact that you have the things you have isn't wrong.  Not understanding what you have is" (p. 5).

Manners aren't about appearance at all... they are about kindness.  You put the other person's comfort before yours, that's good breeding (p. 279).

"Secrets can get heavy.... Undressing a secret makes it naked and takes away its power" (p. 376).

...he was starting to realize that escaping who you were wasn't the same as becoming who you wanted to be (p. 385).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: R.  Very R.  Lots of adult dialog, discussions of sexual anatomy, some discussion of sexual activity (no detailed love scenes), and lots of bad language.  Adults only, kiddos.