The Marriage Game

The Marriage Game- Sara Desai
Berkley/Penguin Group
Release Date: June 9, 2020

Rating:
📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: After her life falls apart, recruitment consultant Layla Patel returns home to her family in San Francisco. But in the eyes of her father, who runs a Michelin starred restaurant, she can do no wrong. He would do anything to see her smile again. With the best intentions in mind, he offers her the office upstairs to start her new business and creates a profile on an online dating site to find her a man. She doesn’t know he’s arranged a series of blind dates until the first one comes knocking on her door…

As CEO of a corporate downsizing company Sam Mehta is more used to conflict than calm. In search of a quiet new office, he finds the perfect space above a cozy Indian restaurant that smells like home. But when communication goes awry, he's forced to share his space with the owner's beautiful yet infuriating daughter Layla, her crazy family, and a parade of hopeful suitors, all of whom threaten to disrupt his carefully ordered life.

As they face off in close quarters, the sarcasm and sparks fly. But when the battle for the office becomes a battle of the heart, Sam and Layla have to decide if this is love or just a game.

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Sam Mehta is a calm and control-oriented person.  He doesn't do noise, family, fun, or distractions.  Blaming himself for his sister's bad marriage and current pain, he has one focus: make the man who hurt her face justice.  But his plans- and his new office- get derailed when his landlord gives his office to someone else and has a heart attack before telling Sam about the change.  Layla is all energy, colors, and chaos as she tries to pull her life together and start her own business, but now she finds herself sharing an office with an uptight jerk who won't leave.  When Layla finds out her father set up blind dates for her, Sam and Layla make a deal: she'll go on the dates and if she gets married to one of the men, Sam can have the office.  No marriage means Sam's out.  Sam might start out as trying to save Layla the way he couldn't save his sister, but somewhere along the way his feelings to Layla become anything but  brotherly.

The Marriage Game is a definite opposites attract book.  Layla is all about emotions and empathy, helping her family and trying to move forward after bad things happen. She claims to not know who she really is and what she really wants, but instinctively she goes for exactly what is right for her- and only starts messing up when she thinks about it.  Sam is all about control, safety, and security. He thinks he knows what he should do and believes that he doesn't deserve happiness.  Both have suffered and I love how Sara Desai shows us the different ways people react to the troubles life brings us.  People can (and as this book shows us, do) become confusing contradictions of thoughts, feelings, and actions when it comes to trying to fix things that are broken and to prevent future pain.  

Desai celebrates Indian culture through food and family, and immerses the reader in a beautiful world of scents, sounds, and colors that explode from the page.  Sam and Layla may be in an office upstairs, but the reader can smell the scents of traditional Indian food cooking in Layla's family restaurant downstairs.  Busybody aunties drive everyone crazy with their matchmaking ways and odd attempts at American-Indian fusion food.  Bad dates mean a variety of humorous situations that inadvertently bring Layla and Sam closer together.  I wish we'd gotten the chance to get to know more of the people in Sam's life, like his sister Nisha, but I recognize that this was part of the point: Sam had closed himself off from his family and we only got to see them through Sam's pinhole vision. It works very well and makes you feel even sorrier for Sam- if we want to get to know Nisha better, think what her own brother is missing out on!

The Marriage Game is about discovering what really matters to you.  Who are you when everything falls apart?  What do you want moving forward? What are you willing to fight for?  Sam is about to discover that sometimes the worst thing that can happen to you is also the best thing that can happen to you.   

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review