I recently read a prerelease copy of Roopa Farooki's Bitter Sweets. My review follows.

I wanted to like this book, and sometimes I did. The writer can put words together in a pleasant, engaging manner, and there are parts of this novel where her narrative voice sustains the enterprise. It's often fun to read. But good writing isn't necessarily enough: you need a plot, you need characters, and perhaps (if it's not too much to hope for,) insight into the human condition.

Unfortunately, the characters here are flat and one-dimensional, and the story is mostly a series of trite vignettes, including an embarrasing hissy fit that ends (spoiler alert) in the traditional hissy fit lunch of vodka and the insides of a medicine chest. The character nearly dies because he doesn't see something the reader had figured out a hundred pages before.

Oddly enough, though the cover clearly tries to sell this as a novel by a fresh new voice along the lines of Jhumpa Lahiri, there's nothing intrinsically subcontinental about this book. It seems to me that you could replace all references to Pakistan and England with (let's say) Indochina and France, and with a few small adjustments, you'd have the same perfectly serviceable novel.

This isn't really a bad book, but it's not exactly a good one, either. Go ahead and take your chances -- you might enjoy the ride.