REVIEW: Variables of Love by M.K. Schiller
B- ReviewsContemporary / New Adult12 Comments
Dear Ms. Schiller:
I’ve enjoyed every book that you’ve written to varying degrees. When this was submitted for review, I started it right away.
The first half of the book was a bit of a struggling as we are told repeatedly that Ethan Callahan, hot math major, has fallen in heavy lust for Meena Kapoor, a senior economics student. But the second half saves the story and becomes a unique, sometimes painful, but enduring romance.
Ethan and Meena attend Stanford and each are in their last year share an Advanced Statistics. What I found a bit strange was how forced Ethan’s internal narrative was as to how beautiful he thought Meena was, how he had to meet her, and was desperate to have any kind of interaction with her at all.
Her name was still a mystery, so I just called her Sunshine. I’d never called a girl that before, but it fit because she made me feel warm, calm, and happy. I’d never seen her smile, but I knew it would be a beautiful sight….
I wasn’t capable of more than a few words in the presence of that sexy mouth of hers. It was ironic how something that created speech made me speechless.
For Meena’s part, she thinks he’s beautiful, charming, and engaging but he’s not for her. Meena will enter into an arranged marriage, as per her family and cultural tradition, following her graduation from Stanford. Meena’s staunch belief in the importance of the arranged marriage and Ethan’s more romantic, Western notions of couplehood form the unique conflict for this book. And importantly, Meena is not merely reciting childhood dictum. She believes in the arranged marriage. (And really it is important for her to have conviction or the conflict is a false construct).
“Yes, I can deny anyone I don’t like. It’s kind of cool in a way. I can ask any question, no matter how private. I can ask them how much they make, what their deepest fears are, who they idolize. Things that might take you twenty dates to figure out, I’ll know in one meeting.”
Ethan shook his head, keeping his eyes fixed on the lake. “You’re missing the best part, Sunshine.”
“What’s that?”
He ran his fingers through his hair, and it miraculously managed to fall right back in place. I had to look away from him. Ethan’s voice was quiet, but his words coursed through me like a physical presence, gravelly and deep. “It’s not the knowing. It’s the finding out.”
Ethan is undeterred. He describes himself as having success because he knows how to break big goals down into little steps. Step 1. Get Meena to smile. Step 2. Get Meena to laugh. etc.
And ultimately, no matter how hard she tries to resist, Meena falls for Ethan but she tells him that their love and their relationship, whatever it may be, has a time limit. When they graduate it will be over. Ethan accepts this, not because he believes in that, but because he is convinced he can change her mind.
But we, the reader, know Meena’s mind whereas Ethan does not so he doesn’t see (or is unwilling to see) her very real belief that Ethan is a wonderful diversion, that she’ll have significant heartbreak but that her family cultural values have meaning beyond a one year romance in college. The time limit lends a bittersweetness to each romantic encounter.
Meena and Ethan become well articulated characters. Ethan’s very logical. He writes pros and cons lists, for instance, but underneath he is quite romantic. The New Year’s Eve gift was the perfect blend of his thinking. Meena is bound up by guilt over a teenage mistake and her need to make up for it. Much of her actions are driven by the loss of her brother and the resulting pain it inflicted on her family.
There are several secondary characters who affect Meena and Ethan. They aren’t sequel bait or orbiting satellites having only tangential importance. One of Meena’s friends is Indian and is struggling with his sexual identity. On the opposite spectrum is a girl who readily has sex. I felt she was castigated overly much for her sexual freedom, although I understood it to be set in contrast with Meena’s more rigid upbringing. I just wish that Meena’s female friend wasn’t the only one villainized for her sex driven behavior.
I was a little surprised at how readily Meena disposed of her virginity with Ethan. She admitted virginity wasn’t a requirement of an arranged marriage but because she’d refrained from sex for so long, the easy capitulation to Ethan confused me.
The talk about arranged marriages was well done because it wasn’t villified. Instead it showed Meena experiencing both range of choices–from the bad to the very good. In the end, this was a battle between heart and head. Meena has to decide whether Ethan is more important to her or whether her family, her cultural values, and everything she’s ever held dear is worth tossing aside for one single individual.
The second half made this book a worthwhile read. The deep dive into cultural beliefs and the examination of the emotion of love was unique and refreshing. B-
Best regards,
Jane
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I’v been intrigued since you mentioned it on Twitter. It does sound like its a bit gloomy, though. But the topic really interests me because of how many of my friends seem to end up in Meena’s dilemma. I am from Bangalore in South India. Some of my friends have indeed battled or worn down their families to marry the person of their choice (most notably my Indian Hindu friend who married a Pakistani Muslim boy- it took them years to even get a visa to visit each others’ family!) But I have been very surprised by the number of my friends who end years-long relationships because their parents are not okay with them marrying a North Indian, or whatever (couldnt they have figured it out sooner??). Which just says I am naive and grew up on too many romance novels and Bollywood movies and hence expect people to rebel against their family to run off and have a love marraige :D
@Janhavi: It’s not super gloomy and I feel bad if I made it seem that way but it is emotional. I felt like it did as good as job as possible of showing the good and bad sides of an arranged marriage. And, since this is a romance book, love marriage does conquer all. ;)
Emotional is fine, and I trust your judgement on the not-too-gloomy-ness of it. It should be fun :)
I’m interested in this too, for obvious reasons. But I’m afraid the combination of Stanford (which I know well) and Indian culture (ditto) will hit my suspension-of-disbelief barrier.
However, I’m sure I won’t be able to resist. How long is the book, Jane?
@Janhavi: It took a family friend years to wear down her loving but relatively conservative parents enough to have them accept her out-of-caste, out-of-region choice for a husband. Both Hindus, both high-caste (but different high castes). And these are cosmopolitan people.
Old traditions die hard.
@Sunita: It’s 250 pages in my PDF ARC. I’d love to know what you think of it.
@Janhavi:
I have a friend whose parents had their own marriage arranged while her father lived in the US and her mother in India, so when my friend was in college (in the US, where the whole family now lives), her parents tried to arrange a marriage for her with a young man from India. But she had met someone else while still in school. Fortunately her parents came around and eventually they totally accepted him.
I’ve also seen it go the other way, especially in the Israeli-American community which I am more familiar with. Marriages aren’t arranged but people are expected to marry within the Jewish religion. I was lucky my parents didn’t exert much of this kind of pressure on myself or my siblings, but even so I got some pressure from others in the community. And some of my friends’ parents did pressure their kids, and for some of those friends, that led to painful breakups.
At some intellectual level I understand the old traditions die hard, but in my real life I have been surprised, because I naively didn’t expect to see this attitude among my extremely cosmopolitan, modern, highly educated friends. And many who were *far* less conservative than me during school and college with regards to relationships and sex have ended up being super traditional when it comes to arranged marriages.
For instance Meena being sure of an arranged marriage yet okay with having sex with Ethan seems totally plausible to me.
@Janine: Do you think that people in the Israeli- American community are often themselves quite keen to marry within-religion?
@Jane: OK, I read it in one evening instead of the other books I was in the middle of. ;) I think you described it pretty well. I didn’t see anything that was seriously off on the cultural side, except maybe for the total lack of extended family and friends in Meena’s world. I realize that is often useful from the plot/conflict point of view, but I don’t know any South Asians who don’t have either family or friends wandering in and out of their lives. Meena has no Indian Aunties, so to speak. That might be part of the reason that the way the arranged marriage part was depicted didn’t ring true for me. She would have had more options, for one thing. She lives in Massachusetts, but she basically had one ex-neighbor as a possibility until almost the end of the book. Loving parents would have lined up way more than that if they really cared about an Indian husband. And Stanford (and the surrounding area) are full of Indian families. The chances of a neurosurgeon from Mumbai knowing a family in Silicon Valley (to keep tabs on his daughter and feed her proper food) are very high.
I agree with Janhavi that sex before marriage isn’t unrealistic. And I’ve known quite a few women college students who have non-Indian boyfriends through school and then break up with them and marry someone that their family approves. So Meena’s deal with Ethan was believable within that frame.
I thought the romance was pretty well done and quite sweet, although I totally agree that Meena switched from teetotalling virgin to confident sexual woman awfully fast. Ethan wasn’t that well developed, as you say, and until the end he was improbably understanding, although again, that’s something that is pretty common in the genre.
For me, the biggest lack of believability was the depiction of undergraduate student life at an elite private university. There were some off things about the Stanford portrayal, but nothing that someone who isn’t very familiar with the place would necessarily catch. But this felt more like a senior year in high school than a senior year in college. After the meet-cute setup they barely talked about schoolwork even though both were in highly demanding majors. They graduated summa but Meena never seemed to be working on an honors thesis. No one ever left town for an interview (even though Ethan wound up at a NY bank). No one talked to their parents, they only texted each other. And so on. This feels more like college in the 80s than college today.
Even with these caveats, and given I’m not a regular NA reader, I enjoyed this quite a bit. I kept reading until I finished, wondering how it would end (I think the last section, after graduation, kind of fell apart). I’d say it’s not as good as The Year We Fell Down on a number of dimensions, but I think people who liked Bowen’s books would like this.
@Sunita: It’s not that I felt Meena having a relationship with Ethan was odd but that she’d held on to her virginity for so long and then seemed to casually give it up to a guy who was nice to her?
But the complaint about the extended family is understandable but I really don’t like books with big casts. It makes it hard to keep track of everyone and in this book we had her friends, his friends, their parents. More people in the mix is difficult for me as a reader.
@Jane: Good point about keeping track of large casts, that’s hard on both authors and readers. But including references to off-page relatives and friends (say Meena’s mother talks to her sister [the mother’s sister, I mean] about prospects) might add some verisimilitude without bogging down the story.
I enjoyed it quite a bit. The romance is sweet, I like that the characters are quite self aware, and in general it was quite interesting and fun.
After reading it, I do agree that Meena’s transition from [mild spoiler] not kissing anyone/dating anyone to sleeping with Ethan in 24 hours seems very rushed. Big picture, I find it plausible, but in the story it is very quick- she doesn’t hesitate or question herself which does seem a bit off.
There wasn’t anything seriously off on the cultural side, but I did find it odd how conservative *every* Indian family is. Meena’s family is plausible but definitely on the conservative end of the spectrum for Indian-American parents whose daughters go to Stanford- they don’t even like her to have friends who are guys! And they are trying to arrange a marriage for her at age 22-23 – frankly I would expect neurosurgeon Indian American parents like hers to be insisting she go to med school, and certainly not be okay with her not having proper post-graduate plans. But its plausible, especially because of the tragedy in her family. Yet Raj’s family is also conservative and so is every other Indian American in the book, pretty much. [Mild spoilers] for instance I find it super odd that Raj’s parents would take their Stanford graduate son to India with them. Shouldn’t he have a job or grad school?
@Sunita: With this book, it doesnt seem to matter too much that its about college students, with just a few tweaks it could be at grad school (especially with all the apartment scenes) or at their first post-college jobs.
Bowen’s series in contrast has a really strong sense of place- its filled with the details of undergrad life.
And since its based on my alma mater I can vouch that it gives a good sense of the actual place, and not just any college, I had lots of fun reading it because really reminded me of my years there.