The Shaadi Set-Up
By: Lillie Vale
Publication: September 7th 2021 by G.P. Putnam's Sons
368 pages
Genre: New Adult, Contemporary
Source: Publisher via Edelweiss (Thank you!!)
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Goodreads description--In this witty and heartfelt rom-com debut for fans of Jasmine Guillory, Emily Henry, and Tessa Bailey, an Indian-American woman signs herself and her boyfriend up for a matchmaking site to prove they’re a perfect match, only to be paired with her ex instead.
High school sweethearts Rita Chitniss and Milan Rao were the golden couple, until the day he broke her heart. Now, six years later, Rita has turned her passion for furniture restoration into a career and has an almost-perfect boyfriend, Neil. The last thing she needs is for Milan to re-enter her life, but that’s exactly what happens when her mother, an unfailing believer in second chances, sets them up. Milan is just as charming, cocky, and confident as he was back in school. Only this time, he actually needs her business expertise, not her heart, to flip a hard-to-sell house for his realty agency.
While Rita begrudgingly agrees to help, she’s not taking any risks. To prove she’s definitely over him, she signs herself and Neil up on MyShaadi.com, a Desi matchmaking site famous for its success stories and trustworthy enough to convince everyone that she and Neil are the new and improved couple. Instead, she’s shocked when MyShaadi’s perfect match for her isn’t Neil…it’s Milan. Ignoring the website and her mother is one thing, but ignoring Milan proves much more difficult, especially when she promises to help him renovate the beach house of her dreams. And as the two of them dive deeper into work—and their pasts—Rita begins to wonder if maybe her match wasn’t so wrong after all….
2021 has been an odd reading year for me. The birth of my 3rd child in January put me behind my typical reading schedule. I honestly just wasn't in the mood to read even when I normally would have tried to squeeze in time here or there. Add in our home renovation that started in April. So what books I have read up until now this year have been books for pleasure. The Shaadi Set-Up, I thought, would be the perfect mix of pleasure and "work" (for review). And it was.
I did find the beginning of The Shaadi Set-Up slow. I haven't been giving books much of a chance to hook me before I've been putting them down to find something that does hook me. I kept pressing on with this one because of the building pressure I felt to finish some of my review books. And I would say somewhere between 20 and 30% I started feeling the desire to keep reading when I had to stop. By that point, I kind of got a feel for what direction this book was headed in and I was on board.
The Shaadi Set-Up is a typical "the one who got away"/"still in love with each other" story. Rita and Milan dated for 6 years between high school and college. They were completely in love. Or so Rita thought. When Milan completely surprises her by breaking up with her, via voicemail, she does whatever it takes to move on. Six years after their break up, Rita is dating Neil but she's only interested in having fun. Neil is looking for long term but he has his own issues, such as letting his mother dictate much of his life. Rita doesn't feel like she can introduce Neil to her family because his father was once engaged to her mother. They had a bad break up. It doesn't matter anyway because Rita's mother is determined to try to mend fences between Rita and Milan.
I really enjoyed The Shaadi Set-Up. I can see myself being just as stubborn as Rita. She refuses to let on to Milan how painful seeing him still is for her. She knows that they are different people than they were back then. Yet she knows that she needs closure. Working with him is difficult. Old patterns are hard to resist, and things she loved about him before are still the same even if they both have changed over the years. I loved seeing their relationship transform into each different stage. It was easy to see where they we headed and how things would end up.
Since becoming a mother I find that I can't help but relate to any mother in a story. I particularly found myself feeling sad for Rita's mother. I think other mothers might enjoy the story between these two as an addition to the main storyline.
I will say that the description, especially of the two houses that Rita and Milan worked on, really helped me picture everything as if I were there. Along the same lines, Lillie Vale must have some kind of special relationship with food since the sheer variety of dishes mentioned and described throughout was impressive.
Overall, The Shaadi Set-Up gets 4 Stars. Have you read The Shaadi Set-Up? What did you think? Let me know!
