BOOK REVIEW: Grown-Up Pose by Sonya Lalli @saskinthecity @berkleypub #grownuppose #bookreview

After reading The Matchmaker’s List last year, Sonya Lalli became a must-read author for me. She writes these incredible contemporary fiction novels that explore the push and pull between tradition and modern life on Indian women. Her latest novel Grown-Up Pose is fresh, heart-warming, thought-provoking, and compulsively readable to the very last page.

About the Book

A delightfully modern look at what happens for a young woman when tradition, dating, and independence collide, from acclaimed author Sonya Lalli.

Adulting shouldn’t be this hard. Especially in your thirties. Having been pressured by her tight-knit community to get married at a young age to her first serious boyfriend, Anu Desai is now on her own again and feels like she is starting from the beginning.

But Anu doesn’t have time to start over. Telling her parents that she was separating from her husband was the hardest thing she’s ever done—and she’s still dealing with the fallout. She has her young daughter to support and when she invests all of her savings into running her own yoga studio, the feelings of irresponsibility send Anu reeling. She’ll be forced to look inside herself to learn what she truly wants.

Reflection

I almost want to call this a coming of age book, but that would imply a main character in adolescence approaching adulthood. I think there needs to be a better genre to describe that transition from college through your early 30s. For many people (and our main character Anu), this is a period of time when our lives develop quickly and we don’t always get a chance to finish growing up.

Anu is an Indian woman living in Canada, and as the book opens she is nearly a year into a separation with her husband Neil, struggling to manage the co-parenting. Anu’s marriage happened the way good Indian marriages do—they met young (mere teenagers), courted, married young, and had a child. Anu has done everything right to be a good Indian daughter and wife. She does the cooking and cleaning, she became a nurse, and she does the bulk of the childcare duties.

Years into their marriage, Anu suddenly realizes how unhappy she is. She is in a job she isn’t passionate about, barely has any friends, and basically acts as a parent to both her daughter and her husband. Now during the separation, she has started dating someone new, but she’s not really getting the experiences she missed getting married so young.

On her journey to find herself, Anu finds herself purchasing a failing yoga studio, having some reckless nights out, and amidst all of the trial and errors, Anu may just come out of the other side finally able to be her best grown-up self.

One of the main themes of this book is the pressure put on Indian women, and really women in general, to be a certain type of person and make the right steps in life. In The Matchmaker’s List, we saw a woman who defied those early, now uncertain if she will be able to find the things she rejected as a young woman. In Grown-Up Pose, we see a woman who did everything she was supposed to and then a decade later she realizes she is going through the motions of a life she isn’t sure she wanted.

If we haven’t lived a little and made some mistakes, how can we ever know if we got the life we wanted?

A story full of ups and downs, laughs and heartfelt moments, and telling the story of a woman who was forced to grow up before she really lived.

Thank you to Berkley Publishing for my copy. Opinions are my own.