Review: Secrets of a Bollywood Marriage by Susanna Carr

by Elyse

Grade: C-
Title: Secrets of a Bollywood Marriage
Author: Carr
Publication Info: Harlequin April 2014
ISBN: 978-0263908459
Genre: Contemporary Romance

I was craving the crazy melodrama of Harlequin Presents when I picked up Secrets of a Bollywood Marriage by Susanna Carr. I’ve read Presents about billionaires, princes, sultans, sheikhs, and Russian oligarchs, but a Bollywood hero was a new one for me. Color me intrigued.

There wasn’t a lot about this book that deviated from the traditional Presents’ storyline: rich, powerful husband and girl-from-the-wrong-side-of-town wife are estranged. Feelings are not discussed. Emotions and sexual tension run high. The backdrop was different—and nicely painted—but the plot was the same.

Dev is a Bollywood star, and the son of Bollywood royalty. I learned from Google that nepotism in Bollywood is quite the thing, so Dev is moving around the upper echelons of Mumbai society. His wife, Tina, comes from a more humble background. She’s also an actress, but she’s hardly a star. Her mother was a stage mom who pushed Tina, and now Tina supports the entire family.

The book opens with Tina returning home after a four month estrangement from Dev. She’s cut her hair, disappeared from the tabloids, and returned (hopefully) a new woman. Tina is still recovering from a profound depression that struck her after she had a late term miscarriage. Unable to cope, she fled to the United States where she sought inpatient psychiatric help (good for you, Tina, getting the help you needed). I like it when books actually portray solutions to mental illness that are more involved than a bottle of wine and good cry with your girlfriends.

Dev is having a huge party when she arrives home, unannounced, and for Tina this highlights the difference in their attitudes toward the miscarriage. She came completely unglued; Dev seemed to proceed more or less as normal. Dev sees his wife and carries her off to a courtyard for some hot smooching even though she’s all “No, no, stop with the hot smooching I clearly am enjoying, I need a divorce!”

The crux of this novel is that Dev and Tina married when Tina became pregnant, then they were torn apart when she miscarried. They handled the miscarriage very differently and aren’t talking about their feelings.

Tina wants the divorce because she thinks Dev married her just because she got knocked up. Dev doesn’t want the divorce because he loves Tina and wants to make the marriage work but he doesn’t actually say that.

I have a really hard time with books that are structured entirely around a hero not saying what he’s feeling. It’s like the Jenga of plotlines. It’s wobbly and it’s going make me yell and pee a little when it comes crumbling down.

Instead of one sentence that would have rendered the rest of the story moot, Dev tells her that his father died while she was away and he’s inherited his family’s entertainment empire. He needs to appear stable so his investors won’t back out. Tina agrees to stay married to Dev for a few months while he sorts things out. He plans on using this time to convince her she wants to stay his wife.

This is what really didn’t work for me here. This entire book could have been one chapter long, had the hero simply told the heroine what he was feeling. Yes, Dev feels betrayed because Tina literally vanished on him (he doesn’t know about the inpatient facility she stayed at or how deep her depression truly was). I understand that he was sheltering his feelings to some degree, but a simple “No, I want to try and make this work, I love you,” seems a lot less contrived than, “Stay married to me because business and I will secretly try and seduce you.”

That’s the Presents’ hero MO though—if they talk about their feelings an angel dies or something. It is verboten.

So they spend two months together, getting to know each other in a way that surprised me. I knew from the background that they married quickly because Tina was pregnant, but Dev seems completely unaware of his wife’s life. He’s surprised she doesn’t have an air conditioned trailer or an assistant when she’s acting, which seems doubly suspicious because 1. you met her at work. You get how the Bollywood class system works. You are big-star-man, she is sexy-extra-girl. She does not get an assistant and 2. even if Dev really was that oblivious, he never visited her at work? Also, it’s my understanding that once a Bollywood actress marries, she typically stops acting (although I suppose that’s not universal).

Dev is surprised his wife likes food from street vendors (and who doesn’t really? I once ate at six different Vienna Hot Dog stands in a day while in Chicago. It was worth it, people). He’s amazed at how incredibly shitty her mother aka Momma Rose from Gypsy is when she demands Tina get back to work to pay for her sister’s dowry.

It’s like, Dev, where were you, buddy? We know they dated, then were married some time presumably between the first and last month of pregnancy. Some of Dev’s total lack of awareness beggared belief.

Tina also baffled me occasionally. She alternates complains that Dev was too distant during the aftermath of the miscarriage and that he was too controlling, trying “fix” everything for her. I guess it’s possible to be both, but I struggled with this. Either he swooped in trying to make everything better or he wasn’t present.

To add to Tina’s woes, no one, literally no one, is supportive of her marriage to Dev. Dev’s family looks down on her. Dev’s fans see her as the seductress she’s typically typecast as—conning their star into marriage. Fellow actresses and people in the industry treat her like a gold-digging whore. It’s a Cinderella story without the friendly mice to help her out. Tina really needed those fucking mice, man. It was tough reading about her total lack of support.

I liked this book as much as I liked quick Cinderella-themed stories. I appreciated the Bollywood background. What I struggled with is that the plot hinged on the hero and heroine not sitting down and just talking things through. One open conversation would be enough to establish that they are both hurting from the loss of their child, they both still love each other, and that Dev wants to make the marriage work. Really, all Dev had to do was tell Tina, “I didn’t just marry you because I got you pregnant. I was in love.”

I needed an internal conflict that was more conflict-y, and I needed an external conflict that wasn’t everyone shitting on Tina. Secrets of a Bollywood Marriage is worth it if you really want a Bollywood book, but I needed something more solidly built.

This book is available from Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Kobo | All Romance eBooks

Categories: General Bitching, Reviews, Reviews by Author, Authors, A-C, Reviews by Grade, Grade C