Name: lh's review of Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev
Item: Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors
Rating: 4
Author: lh

Sonali Dev

Award-winning author Sonali Dev launches a new series about the Rajes, an immigrant Indian family descended from royalty, who have built their lives in San Francisco... It is a truth universally acknowledged that only in an overachieving Indian American family can a genius daughter be considered a black sheep. Dr. Trisha Raje is San Francisco’s most acclaimed neurosurgeon. But that’s not enough for the Rajes, her influential immigrant family who’s achieved power by making its own non-negotiable rules: · Never trust an outsider · Never do anything to jeopardize your brother’s political aspirations · And never, ever, defy your family Trisha is guilty of breaking all three rules. But now she has a chance to redeem herself. So long as she doesn’t repeat old mistakes. Up-and-coming chef DJ Caine has known people like Trisha before, people who judge him by his rough beginnings and place pedigree above character. He needs the lucrative job the Rajes offer, but he values his pride too much to indulge Trisha’s arrogance. And then he discovers that she’s the only surgeon who can save his sister’s life. As the two clash, their assumptions crumble like the spun sugar on one of DJ’s stunning desserts. But before a future can be savored there’s a past to be reckoned with... A family trying to build home in a new land. A man who has never felt at home anywhere. And a choice to be made between the two.

A Novel

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

Google test

Salam Kabbani

Amy Buckle

Dr. Trisha Raje is San Francisco's most acclaimed neurosurgeon. But that's not enough for the Rajes, her influential immigrant family who achieved power by making its own non-negotiable rules. Trisha has been guilty of breaking all the rules, but finally has a chance to redeem herself. Up-and-coming chef DJ Caine has known people like Trisha before, people who judge him by his rough beginnings and place pedigree above character. He needs the lucrative job the Rajes offer, but he values his pride too much to indulge Trisha's arrogance. Then he discovers that she's the only surgeon who can save his sister's life. But before a future can be savored there's a past to be reckoned with ...

I received a proof of this book from a goodreads giveaway

Starting out the family seems like too much to be believed and the stakes are so high, but by the end I loved it all. It almost reads like a movie that I'd watch over and over. It takes elements from Austen and molds them into a new form showing how the same sort of judgments appear in a modern setting.

Want to love it but I cannot fathom him not falling neither first nor harder?????????? 

Somya Verma

Emma

A beautiful story. Had me emotional all through out the book.

Yulande Lindsay

Five stars are not enough. This is one of the best books I've read this year. Very loosely based on Pride and Prejudice, Sonali Dev deals with the themes of love, family, betrayal, class and redemption deftly with a skill that draws you in makes it very hard to leave. Highly recommend.

Sahi K

Mostly a 3.5.

I had read books by this author before, but long ago that I don’t remember much about them. However, when I read the synopsis for this one and realized it’s a desi retelling of P&P, I was just so happy. I also loved that this was set in US, because I can relate more to diaspora stories these days than those set completely in India. And this one both impressed and frustrated the hell out of me. 

Trisha is an accomplished neurosurgeon who takes immense pride in her job but is quite socially inept. She also immensely loves her family, but has a lot of guilt for something that she did fifteen years ago which affected her brother Yash and soured her relationship with her father. She is compassionate and a problem solver and I loved her relationship with her sister and cousins and her grandmother. However, despite working hard to achieve her goals, she has been born to extreme privilege and it shows. She also frequently puts her foot in her mouth because she isn’t good at talking or expressing her feelings. 

DJ is a chef who has left everything he worked for and is almost bankrupt trying to save his sister suffering from a tumor in her brain. He feels almost spiritual about his cooking and takes immense pleasure in seeing people enjoy and appreciate his food. He has also suffered a lot in his life, bullied and tormented and left homeless by his own father’s family, so he feels very hurt when Trisha makes insensitive comments about him and doesn’t see his concerns in tricky situations because of her own privilege. That makes him retaliate with his own harsh words. 

Both these characters hurt each other a lot, both knowingly and unknowingly, argue all the time and even though I saw that they were attracted to each other, I didn’t completely feel invested in their relationship. I just wanted them to stop hating each other. Even though they both are good people, I think I wanted to be convinced that they could be great together too, which I didn’t get in the book. Their getting together felt too much like the end of P&P and I don’t think that translates well to a contemporary setting. 

The author does a good job bringing the Raje family to life. We get to know their history, how the kids have been brought up, their beliefs and values and I think it was all well done. The family is very close to each other and I think that reflected on the page. The author also shows that despite being good people and working towards the betterment of society, both personally and politically, they all are still creatures of privilege and can be tone deaf and insensitive to other’s issues. For all their talk about family loyalty, they are all very quick to judge Trisha for her choices and make her feel more guilty all the time and I didn’t like it. Trisha is such an accomplished woman in her thirties but cowers in front of her father, and even though we are taught in our Indian culture to be very respectful of parents, I particularly hate when parents take advantage of this and emotionally manipulate their children which is what happens here. Even though everything works out towards the end, I think Trisha should have grown a bit of a backbone and stood up for herself instead of everyone just behaving as if it was all ok now. 

This book is only a loose gender bent retelling of Pride and Prejudice which focuses mostly on the character’s pride and prejudices. It is a mostly realistic portrayal of different kinds of families and how class privilege can affect the perceptions of people towards others. Just don’t go into this expecting a lot of romance. It is an interesting read and I didn’t wanna put it down at all, but I also wanted something more from the characters.

cossette

the amount of hipaa violations ... 


cw: cancer, medical talk, ableism, grief, loss, fatshaming, racism (including a white cop questioning a POC main character), microaggressions, miscarriage, stroke, reference to past car crash, rape, character being drugged

Kayla 

I really enjoyed this retelling of Pride and Prejudice! I would say this is definitely more of a loose retelling with aspects of Jane Austen’s classic sprinkled into the plot. What is unique about this one is that the gender roles are reversed. We have Trisha Raje who plays the haughty, prideful Mr. Darcy type and we have DJ Caine who plays works hard and has skepticism about rich people, Lizzie Bennet. Trisha is a neurosurgeon who is treating DJ’s sister Emma. She is also trying to get back into the good graces of her family after a mistake she made as a teenager when she trusted Julia Wickham as a friend. .
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I also really enjoyed this book because of the aspects of Indian culture thrown in! I like when authors adapt this classic into their own culture because it makes it so captivating to read. Both DJ and Trisha have the most fascinating, albeit complicated back stories, full of drama and betrayal! If you adored the original or Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal, I think you are really going to love this one! .
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Ruby Huber

This book slaps, made me so hungry tho beware. Pride and prejudice but from a different perspective, and horny for food.

Renee Delcourt

I think this was a middle of the road book for me. It felt like a good all buster book to be honest. I think there were a lot of places that I kind of rolled my eyes at some of the events in the book... I got frustrated with some of the repetitions of speech in the book and at times was annoyed with how the book felt like a ramble of back story more than anything else. The book was quick to read and is a pretty angsty yet fluffy story line.

Actual Rating: 3.5

CW: Homelessness, abandonment, grief, rape, cancer, difficult situations. 

In this delicious book of many flavors we are taken far away from the land of Miss. Bennett and Mr. Darcy into the modern day San Francisco Bay, and oh making the reader feel so many different kinds of ways :) If you think this is cheesy..well lucky for you Sonali Dev is a much more talented writer than I am and will have you enjoying this P&P spin off in no time! 

Our main characters Dr. Trisha Raje and Chef DJ Caine are simultaneously repulsed and attracted to each other. They have very different upbringings and have led incredibly divergent life experiences. Trisha comes from a family of Indian royalty and has been very fortunate in many areas of her life. She worked tirelessly for years on end to become a world renowned neurosurgeon at Stanford, with the main focus of curing blindness and saving lives. Though her life seems glamorous on the outside, she is plagued with many tribulations in her personal life, including a decade old betrayal by a best friend that caused a deep schism between her and her family as the friend's betrayal directly impacted her older brother Yash's political career, and as in any deeply routed cultural family naturally the eldest son's dreams are the one and only priority (eye roll implied). Additionally, Trisha seems to be emotionally stunted when it comes to relationships in general and especially romantic ones. 

Now meet chef Darcy, aka DJ Caine who is talented at mixing ethnic flavors with delicate French cuisine, and steels hearts one at a time with his amazing flavors. For lack of a better description, DJ and his sister Emma have truly lived the "hard knocks" life. Their mom was African and their father was a "fair-skinned" Indian living in England who was trying to erase any evidence of his "darker" origins in the hopes of never being recognized as anything but English. This because of his family's ideals. As fate would have it he fell in love with DJ and Emma's mom who was beautifully dark skinned; however, that is not something his family approved of. When DJ's father passed, his dad's family kicked DJ, Emma, and their mom onto the streets and they are forced to fend for themselves until of course his mom has a stroke. After being homeless DJ builds himself up, and goes to culinary school in pursuit of his dream, all while ensuring his sister Emma is taken care of and able to pursue her passion of painting. 

So where do these two protagonists collide? Well Emma has a life threatening tumor squeezing her optic nerves. Trisha's cousin happens to work with DJ and recommends that Emma's tumor is evaluated by her. Trisha has just completed the new technology that will save Emma's life, but not spare her sight. As it happens, DJ is also catering all the events for the Raje family (aka Trisha's family) for her brother's big campaign. This of course while Trisha has to balance a family secret, accept a failing "relationship" with a surgeon she's been sleeping with, and figure out why Julia the traitor friend has suddenly resurfaced in their lives. 

As you can see this all tastes like loads of drama and fun, and of course when Trisha is attracted to DJ he is repulsed by her, so all the more spice. 

This book was really deep. It touched on a lot of societal issues and racial disparities faced in many cultures including our own in the US. It teaches us that we have to be vulnerable and open up our hearts to truly receive love and give it back, even though that may carry risks. It teaches us that we all make mistakes, and no matter how big or small, after seeking amends and rectifying the damage to our extent, we must forgive ourselves and move on, because we can't stay paralyzed in past mistakes and traumas if we want to move forward. 

The reason I gave this book a 3.5 is because there were parts where I felt like it dragged on a little. There was A LOT in here, and not to say that's a bad thing, I really liked the book. I just felt like not everything clicked together all the time and in some parts the story line came off a little bit choppy because of that. 

I definitely enjoyed comparing and contrasting the similarities between it and the original Pride and Prejudice. I also loved the divergence and the unique flavors this book brought. I will definitely be reading the remaining 2 books in this series.

Alejandra Bran

I love me some Jane Austen retelling! This is more of a 3.75

Grace Christensen 

Amazing. Spectacular. 👨🏼‍🍳🤌🏼💋

This is a perfect example of sticking to the original story enough for it to noticeably be Pride and Prejudice but changing things up enough for it to be it’s own story. All the key components were there and I love how the main characters kept their main traits while being completely different from the original Pride and Prejudice characters. A lot of times when I read a retelling of P&P, people make Darcy into a cold or callous person when in the original, he was simply unable to accurately express his emotions. I love how Trisha in this retelling is a little awkward and inadvertently rude to DJ, but she’s obviously also a very loving and kind person especially towards her family.

Both these characters were instantly lovable. I didn’t have to get past any glaring character flaws in order to get into the story. DJ’s love for his sister as well as Trisha’s love for her family endeared me immediately. You can’t be a horrible person if you actively care for those around you. Right?

I also loved the plot line. It had the key themes of Pride and Prejudice but it also had its own events and conflicts to spice things up. I knew how it would end (which I love in a romcom) but getting to the end was it’s own adventure. 

The only thing I didn’t love about this book was that it was told in third person POV. I much prefer first person especially in romances because it’s easier for me to get immersed in the story. But that is totally my preference and not something I’m going to detract points for.


Anyway, please go read this. It’s adorable and warm and everything you need in a romance.

Alyssa Jacunski

Honestly, I had the companion novel to this on my radar before this one specifically. Since that's the companion, I immediately scrolled through my library's electronic collection to get my hands on this.

A modern day retelling of Pride and Prejudice, we follow Dr. Trisha Raje and DJ Caine. Both characters meet toward the beginning of the novel, and it isn't exactly a stereotypical meet-cute. What follows is a story of love, forgiveness and second chances.

This book, while fun, packed a punch at times and I found myself feeling all sorts emotions reading this. Reading about Dr. Raje and her inner monologue and how she processes information was refreshing. I loved her straight forward thinking even if her thoughts didn't always translate well out loud. While they had a rocky start, I enjoyed watching DJ and Dr. Raje interact with each other. They both come to care a great deal about DJ's sister, and I enjoyed reading about the back story of both characters throughout the novel.

While I really enjoyed it, something kept me from giving this five stars. It didn't quite knock it out of the park and make me fall in love with everything about the book. However, I'm very much looking forward to reading Recipe for Persuasion and spending more time with the Raje's. 

Trigger warning: cancer; poverty; negative police interaction (no brutality); sexual assault; drugging.

Lacey

This was a GREAT P&P retelling, but I had the hardest time trying to like the hero’s character. I never saw what the heroine saw in him.

Amy Buckle &
Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev

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Amy Buckle &Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev

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Amy Buckle &
Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev