A Distant Heart

This was the first Sonali Dev book I've read -- I heard it was really good, and I heard right! Set in Mumbai, we juggle between two timelines, the present day where our hero and heroine have these strained interactions while being chased by a gangster guy, and the earlier timeline when we see them meeting and growing up together, and we eventually learn why their relationship is so strained.

I always hate/love books with a split timeline!!! Just when I'm getting interested in time A, it bounces over to time B and I get so annoyed I want to skip a chapter or two forward to see what's going on with time A again, and vice versa.

This book is lighter on the romance side, but it's there and it's good. The details of Mumbai feel realistic and an interesting place setting.

I laugh at myself because the previous book I read, by Filipino author Mina Esguerra, was written for a (Philippines) domestic audience and it had one or two "Tag-lish" words in there that I had to ask a Filipino friend about. You could tell they were unintentional, 99.9% of that book was completely understandable. This book has Marathi (? I think) terms scattered throughout, rarely with anything beyond context as a help. It seems a little bit of an odd choice, because I think this was intended primarily for English speakers who don't know these terms? I don't know what the intention was, to make the setting more foreign and exotic/inscrutable? It's a minor point and I shouldn't call it out, but I found the unintended neologisms used in Mina's book funny but it's harder to understand this clearly intentional use of words that the reader will not know.

Anyway, I loved how Sonali balanced the different aspects of this book - we get action hero one one part, we have rapunzel romance in another, we have slums and we have bollywood stars. She got a heck of a lot in this book, and I had a great time reading it.