Review: The Marriage Game

The Marriage Game by Sara Desai
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars 

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. 

Layla Patel is going home to San Francisco after walking in on her social media reality star boyfriend in bed with two women and her throwing his stuff out of their apartment is recorded and goes viral. Home to her family's Spice Mill Restaurant where her mother's tough love and father's hugs will help her get her life back on track. She's planning on using the office above her parent's restaurant to start her own business but when her father has a heart-attack and the previous tenant her dad had rented to doesn't get the news that Layla will now be using the office, she's forced to share with a man that annoys and attracts her. 

Sam Mehta is all work and taking care of his sister after an incident leaves his sister Nisha in a wheelchair and him blaming himself. He knows legally the office is his but there's something about Layla that brings out his protective side and other emotions. 

It's an opposites attract and a marriage game. 

Relationships were for men who could protect the people they loved. Not one so focused on his career that he hadn’t seen the danger until it was too late. 

The Marriage Game was a story that started off rom-com, light, and funny but unfortunately, never provided the depth I was looking for. Layla has a big loving family and while there were a lot of characters thrown at me in the beginning, I thought the author did a good job introducing them and giving them enough of an initial spark that I could separate them from each other. The problem I started to have though, was that towards the middle and end, the more important secondary characters were never given any depth. Layla has a loving relationship with her father but after their first scene, he disappears for the vast majority of the book. He comes back in towards the end and the scenes he was in made me wish we had seen him even more because of the emotion he brought. I felt the same way about Sam's sister Nisha, she's the catalyst for Sam's personality and we hardly get any scenes with her and Sam, it was such a wasted opportunity to provide the story with depth and emotion. 

Layla laughed, a real belly laugh that ended in a snort. It was the best sound in the world. Why did it have to come from the woman who irritated him the most? 

Layla and Sam were the sparking opposites attract I like in these flirty and snappy contemporary romances, she's a bit wild to his straitlaced. Layla is trying to start her own company that helps people who have recently been fired find new jobs and Sam's a corporate downsizer. When a man shows up claiming that he has an interview with Layla, she learns that her father put her on a online dating site and set-up ten meetings with potential future husbands. Sam felt like he wasn't there to protect his sister from her abusive husband, so he decides to be the chaperone for Layla during these interviews and if she finds a husband then he gets the office, hence the marriage game. Sam's whole need to have this office has to do with the location and him trying to land a contract with a hospital that will give him access to his sister's ex-husband work record and some security videos, that he hopes will help prove his sister's account of how her accident happened that left her in a wheelchair. It's a plot that is a bit loose but the sparking between Layla and Sam saved it for me in the first half. 

His eyes darkened, smoldered. Electricity sparked between them. She had a curious urge to lean up and kiss him. It made no sense. This was Sam. The man she loved to hate. 

Around fifty percent, Layla and Sam snap and they have a pretty hot stripping clothes off in an elevator sex scene. However, after that, I felt like the story started to go downhill for me. If you're a major movie buff, you might enjoy the numerous Bollywood and Hollywood movie mentions, I found them cute in the beginning but excessive in the second half. The same with Layla's potential husbands, at first the meetings with men who were a bit hokey, gave a little comic relief but the second half had them going on longer and their one-dimensional personalities became over-the-top in the worst ways. The same with Sam's friend Evan and his business partner Royce, their cardboard cut-out weak villainy made Sam seem even more ineffectual and added to the weaker second half. What I did enjoy was Layla's cousin Daisy, her personality brightened up the pages and her friendship and talks with Layla were some of the most natural and enjoyable scenes. 

Seeing him vulnerable, even for a moment, made her wonder what hidden depths lay beneath that prickly shell. 

I thought Sam's decision to turn his back on his family, besides Nisha, and culture should have been discussed more and at the end when he visited his family home should have given us a fuller and longer scene, I was also taken aback by how abrupt the ending cut us off. I noticed this a debut and I think that might have played a part in some of the immature writing, lack of depth, jerky transitions, and overall story cracks that widened in the second half. The flirty and snappiness between Layla and Sam in the beginning though, will have me checking out future books by this author to see the growth in writing as there was definite promise here.

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