Love Marriage

Love Marriage by Monica Ali

Reviewed by Linda
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Thank you @viragopress for sending this copy over.

Welcome to Monica Ali in 2022: more existential, more contemporary, more complex. It’s been a long time since Brick Lane, and it seems as though Ali has bottled up her thoughts over the last 15 years and handed them over to us in the form of Love Marriage…it's 500 pages.

Yasmin Ghorami, a British-Bengali doctor is engaged to Joe Sangster, a fellow white medic. They are worlds apart and refreshingly, the novel is NOT about forbidden love or the rinsed narrative of seeking approval from society/strict parents. Instead it's more about searching for identity. After raising their kids, Yasmin’s parents: Anisah and Shaokat search for their identities too and Ali, portrays the immigrant struggle as they navigated their early years in Britain. Over in Hampstead, we meet Joe and his mum, Harriet. In a mother/son relationship that can be only described as toxic and entitled, Joe learns a lot about himself and we see a lot of him through the lens of his therapist.
When both families meet, there’s a seismic shift and here, the drama unfolds.

The author really does give us a solid background story. How the characters came to be, significant past events, their intimate thoughts and secrets are peppered throughout the book.

Usually I appreciate this, but this time I didn’t like the fact that so many themes and topics were crammed in.
Was the the period sex scene needed? Or an unlikely romantic escapade for Anisah? Let’s just throw in a casual encounter with racism at work for good measure?
For me, there was too much information, at times I felt as though the author was sort of spelling it out for me and after ALLL of it, nothing much quite happened.