Review: Recipe for Persuasion

Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

3.5 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. 

She was the one who couldn’t be the kind of daughter who made her mother want to stay. She was the daughter who wasn’t enough for her father to give up whatever it was he got from his scotch. 

Recipe for Persuasion continues an intimate look into the lives of the Raje family members, an Indian royal family living in California who readers were introduced to in Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors. Newcomers could jump in here, as while past characters still remain a part of the story, this focuses on a different branch. Ashna is the daughter of the younger Raje son, a man who let being a prince and the indulgences of such a position lead him to more selfish and easier decisions, choices that greatly affected Ashna's childhood and turned her into an extremely closed off and dealing with depression and anxiety induced by PTSD now adult. Ashna met Rico when they were in highschool and the two secretly dated for two years before there was a major blow-out involving her father. Twelve years later, Rico decides that he wants at least some closure with Ashna and decides to get on the reality cooking show “Cooking With the Stars” where Ashna will be competing as a chef. 

She was with him even when she wasn’t with him. 

The beginning sets up our characters with Ashna still reeling and dealing with the fallout of her alcoholic father's suicide twelve years earlier. To escape after the suicide, Ashna went to culinary school in Paris, leaving her father's restaurant, Curried Dreams, in the hands of employees who in turn embezzled money and has her still trying to stave off bankruptcy. While Ashna's intensely private and gets severe panic attacks whenever she tries to alter her Baba's (father) recipes, severely hampering her cooking ability, another fight with her mother has her agreeing to be on the show. 

We get less of an in depth look at Rico's life, currently, he's just retired from being a star football (soccer) player and musing over the fact he is godfather to more than one ex-girlfriend's children. He lost his parents young and while his mother was his father's mistress, they loved each other and he had a happy childhood. There's some drawing out, in regards to the pain he felt as a child over his father never really being able to claim him publicly, through Ashna wanting to keep their relationship secret in highschool and feeling like she choose her father over him, to give his character's emotions some depth. However, he's more to the side and why I'm not sure I'd fully call this genre romance but more of a mashup of women's fiction and, what I call, literary romance. 

Have you ever thought about what it means to hide what’s important to you from those you love?

What isn't immediately apparent but instead is slowly, onion layers peeled away, is that the main relationship of the story isn't about romantic love but mother and daughter. Most of the first half showcases Ashna's point-of-view of how her fierce advocate for girl and women's rights mother, Shoban, constantly abandoned her and how that made her feel unloved and unwanted. The second half gives readers Shoban's side of the story, with flashbacks and her current thoughts and feelings. Shoban's character came very close to stealing the show, if not doing so at times, and I found myself almost wishing this was her story. 

  

 She’d finally listen. 

If you're going into this strictly for the romance, you'd end up missing what makes Sonali Dev's writing so beautifully piercing at times; the profound way it speaks family relationships and how quietly devastating and loving they can be. Ashna's aunt, Mina, calmly speaks this to Ashna:“I like to believe we changed things at least a little, your mother more than me. But in this changed world, you girls can’t seem to see how it was for us. You can’t see our obstacles because we removed them for you. And now you get to judge us from a perspective that we weren’t lucky enough to enjoy.”. It is a fairly quick moment but has such power when Ashna relates it to her mother. 

“Do you mean it?” Her voice was a whisper. 

He swallowed, his thickly stubbled jaw tightening. “Mean what?” 

“Everything you say to me with your eyes?” 

Along with the poignant writing, I took delight in some of the little details, like how Dev continues with her Jane Austen tie-ins. As you can guess by the title, Ashna and Federico 's second chance love story is inspirit of Anne and Frederick from Persuasion. The closeness of their names is cute but the hashtag that grows from fan's love of the pair on the reality cooking show, #Ashico, “which when said out loud sounded far too much like the Hindi word ashiquo which, disastrously enough, meant “lovers.””, is a perfect book's cultural little tie-in bow. 

While I didn't quite get all I needed from Rico and his relationship with Ashna, this story was more about the forest than the trees for me. The overarching look at how familial relationships shape and define us and how that leads us to shape and define our own relationships. Dev's writing always has a beating heart underneath it that never fails to move and connect with me some way, I'm looking forward to going on the next emotional journey with the Raje family. 

View all my reviews