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.
My Review
When looking over the synopsis for Grown-Up Pose, my eyes lingered on the line of Anu running her own yoga studio. As a practicing yogi myself, I love finding books to read about others who have a love for the poses. So I decided to give it a go, and ended up getting hooked by the storyline. Anu has always been the good girl – following her parent’s rules, finding a good Indian boy to marry – not until they had been dating for five years, and saving themselves for the wedding night first – having a daughter, focusing on being a good wife and mother. But Anu is tired of playing by the rules, tired of feeling like her life was not her choice. So she makes a decision – to separate from her husband, to date outside of her culture, to spontaneously book a plane ticket, to buy a failing yoga studio. Anu searches for happiness everywhere, to find that thing she has been missing to make her life click again – without really understanding what she is missing and why she is searching for it.
This novel is all about self-discovery, and while Anu wasn’t always the most likeable throughout the book and made some pretty terrible decisions, it felt very real. I was bumbling about with her, trying to understand why certain choices blew up in her face and others seemed so obvious but looked over. I appreciated that a romance novel started with the after part of happily-ever-after, and didn’t have a smooth path to the last page. It was also very interesting to learn more about another culture – the expectations, the relationships between family and in-laws – and the struggle between modern and traditional lifestyles. There were times the storyline felt a little too crammed and disjointed, but for the most part I really enjoyed this one and took a lot away from reading it.
4 stars
