Blog Tour: The Shaadi Set-Up

Hello friends! I have such an exciting adult romance to share with you all today! Thanks so much to Lonely Pages Book Tours for including me on this tour!!

About the Book:

In this witty and heartfelt rom-com debut for fans of Jasmine Guillory, Emily Henry, and Tessa Bailey, an Indian-American woman signs herself and her boyfriend up for a matchmaking site to prove they’re a perfect match, only to be paired with her ex instead.

High school sweethearts Rita Chitniss and Milan Rao were the golden couple, until the day he broke her heart. Now, six years later, Rita has turned her passion for furniture restoration into a career and has an almost-perfect boyfriend, Neil. The last thing she needs is for Milan to re-enter her life, but that’s exactly what happens when her mother, an unfailing believer in second chances, sets them up. Milan is just as charming, cocky, and confident as he was back in school. Only this time, he actually needs her business expertise, not her heart, to flip a hard-to-sell house for his realty agency.

While Rita begrudgingly agrees to help, she’s not taking any risks. To prove she’s definitely over him, she signs herself and Neil up on MyShaadi.com, a Desi matchmaking site famous for its success stories and trustworthy enough to convince everyone that she and Neil are the new and improved couple. Instead, she’s shocked when MyShaadi’s perfect match for her isn’t Neil…it’s Milan. Ignoring the website and her mother is one thing, but ignoring Milan proves much more difficult, especially when she promises to help him renovate the beach house of her dreams. And as the two of them dive deeper into work—and their pasts—Rita begins to wonder if maybe her match wasn’t so wrong after all….

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About the Author:

Lillie Vale is the young adult author of ALA’s 2020 Rainbow Books List selection Small Town Hearts and Beauty and the Besharam (forthcoming from Viking Children’s). She writes about girls fighting back, secret-keeping and between-places, the ways in which we’re haunted, food as a love language, and all the feels. Born in Mumbai, she grew up in Mississippi, Texas, and North Dakota, and now lives in an Indiana college town where the corn whispers and the woods creep. Vale graduated with an MBA and now holds her dream job as a professional world builder and (sometimes) ship sinker. Always dreaming of crumbling ivy-covered castles and going back to the seaside. Her debut adult romantic comedy, The Shaadi Set-Up, releases in 2021. Find her on Twitter @LillieLabyrinth and Instagram @labyrinthspine, or visit her website lillielabyrinth.com.

My Thoughts:

This was such a fun romance read to get my mind off the more stressful parts of life. I went into The Shaadit Set-Up with no idea what it was about, and it turned out to have one of my favorite romance tropes: second chance romance! I really loved how the author seamlessly incorporated Indian/Eastern culture into the book. The representation was so great to read and really added to my love for this book.

The actual romance was quite the slow-burn. There was a lot of pining and banter, and the characters don’t really get together until the 75% mark, but I was totally okay with that. Rita was such a great main character that I could really connect with. She thinks with her head and doesn’t jump into relationships on a whim. In fact she could kinda be considered a commitment-phobe if she didn’t have such strong feelings for Milan. She has a genuine, wry sense of humor that works especially well when she’s dealing with her family and their expectations.

My only complaint was that at times I couldn’t really feel Rita and Milan’s connection. Something felt lacking and I think if we got flashback to when they began dating in high school, we could have felt more of that connection. Overall though, this was still such a solid romance that I enjoyed reading! It so easy to binge in one sitting 🙂

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Thanks so much for reading and let me know if you’ll pick this book up!!