Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This debut novel has gotten good buzz, and the book itself is at least in part based on the author's experience as an American woman working in India in IT (fun to have a STEM heroine based in reality… that part does come across well) and as someone who married an Indian man (some of which is supposedly depicted in the book). However, the book suffers from flaws typical of debut novels, even though according to the acknowledgments, she has worked with a host of people to shape this book, including those at her publisher and her critique writing partners. I was turned off right away by the info-dumping that starts the book; seriously, that is the first thing a publisher should prune! That's just always a big turnoff for me. A skilled writer—as we assume one who got a book contract from a publisher should be—should weave that information into the book proper instead of trying to tell us everything she deemed important for us to know right at the start. I also thought the book had issues with pacing. It is a long book, nearly 400 pages, but it starts off glacially slow. Things pick up and even out a little once she gets to India, but at times even in that part, unimportant details and conversations slowed the story's pace. But then the end feels rushed. Despite the massive team she had, she didn't seem to have the people who would help her shape this somewhat amorphous mass of a book into a better one—nor did she have that knowledge herself. By the way, there's also profanity in this book, including the F-bomb. I don't like to see profanity in any book, and I honestly think that authors should warn about this in their book descriptions so those of us who don't like to be exposed to such things in their reading material don't have to be. Unfortunately, Amazon did not include the Look Inside ability for any of December's First Reads, as I certainly would not have chosen this book if I had seen the info dumps and profanity.