Sari, Not Sari by Sonya Singh

Charity (My Brighter Books)

2 years ago

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Bookish Review

My Rating:

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest opinion

Book was published on April 5, 2022. I may have not thoroughly enjoyed it, but you may! Buy your copy HERE.

Sari, Not Sari by Sonya Singh had a good premise when reading the description of the book. I love to read about Indian culture and I love a good Girl Boss vibe. But unfortunately this book has lost its mark with me.

Our main character is Manny who is a CEO of her own company called Break Up. Where they have clients request personalized break ups done for them that is communicated through email.

Now Manny was unfortunately never really taught about her culture because her parents desire to ingrain her in America. Now that her parents are gone due to a tragic accident, she is still dealing with her grief of that loss and chooses to engross herself with work in her company.

Alongside her working all the time is her fiance Adam who isn’t really there a lot and pushes her to work more. He also can’t make a commitment to set a date for them to start planning their wedding.

Through a mishap of magazine white washing her features on the cover. Manny realizes that she needs to understand her own self and her Indian culture.

In comes Sammy, and some of my issues with this plot. Sammy is an Indian man who has a non Indian girlfriend. He needs Manny’s services to do a “temporary” break up with his girlfriend for just a week for his brother’s wedding. Sammy explained that Indian culture is so tight on marrying other Indian’s women that he was also afraid that his family of Patels would cancel his brother’s wedding due to his choice of a girlfriend.

Manny addressed, why can’t you just be honest with family instead of temporarily breaking up with his girlfriend? But Sammy was adamant that this was the only “solution.” Which to me, was kinda shallow and didn’t make sense to me.

So in exchange for doing this personalized email for Sammy, she asked him to take her to his brother’s wedding to have a crash course about the culture. Which to me from an outsider’s perspective, Manny experienced it and not really learned about it.

So the book goes on where she is getting to know Sammy’s family and on with the family wedding festivities. That’s where they eventually got to know one another and realized that they loved one another. With the reason’s below, not sure how that happened.

My biggest issue of this book are these:

It took maybe 45-50% of the book to finally really start to see Sammy in Sari, Not Sari. For a rom-com, that felt like forever! I felt like the love interest should have been introduced and the relationship built a lot sooner than it did in the book.
You don’t really get to know Sammy, heck you barely see them interact with each other in the book. So it was Insta Romance that happened in a span of a week. A lot of the story is Manny interacting with everyone but Sammy. Actually, you may know more about Sammy through his family than Sammy himself. So I felt there was no chemistry there and no true build of romance.
Both Manny and Sammy were in separate relationships throughout the book, which I felt wasn’t really addressed as a good conclusion in the book. It was half haphazardly mentioned and dealt with and then it was over.
Not sure why this bothers me but here it is. One of the family members gets upset with Manny about using their family to learn about Indian culture. The girl told Manny to leave and not come back. But for reasons I really can’t remember, Manny decides to stay for the wedding. Well, you don’t see that situation get resolved at all. So I am wondering, why build that relationship throughout the book with that relative and without a peep of that situation you don’t read of that person again. No resolution, just tossed through the window as if it never happened.
The resolution of the ending in the last 5% of the book was not great. It felt quick and it didn’t make sense. I really feel the ending needs to be stronger because the ending is what really made me feel this book wasn’t good.

This book had good potential, but I feel that romance wasn’t strong for a rom-com and the ending wasn’t that good.

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