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Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Press for an e-ARC of this book.

2.5 stars, rounded up

I'm feeling a little sad to rate this book so low. The first half of the book was quite good. It was a good look at motherhood and pregnancy, and the pressure that women like our main character Sanjana feel from those around them. Sanjana is the daughter of Indian immigrants whose relationship was the result of an arranged marriage, and her views surrounding marriage and motherhood are influenced by this background. I felt like the first half of the book did a pretty decent job weaving all these topics together and digging into Sanjana's feelings on them.

In the second half of the book, though, the analysis just felt way shallower. Once in India, Sanjana goes into a daze and stops thinking so hard about pregnancy, even though she is surrounded by women who are trying to conceive (which is in sharp contrast to how she felt around her friend Lia in the first half of the book). We also get what I would consider a "villain monologue" towards the end that would have been a great segue to talk more deeply about the pressure many women face to become mothers, but Sanjana's strongest reaction to that is basically just thinking, "I understand why she feels that way and I don't blame her". I don't think Sanjana needed to have her own monologue on the subject, but a bit more than what we got would've been nice.

There were also some writing choices in the last parts of the book that just left me feeling dissatisfied. First was the fact that a few of the things Sanjana did in India were motivated by her thinking "it felt natural" to do. Each time that type of descriptor popped up, my immediate reaction was, "Why, though?" Also, going back to the lack of depth, the ending just felt a little too neat. I can get that Sanjana's experience with Sanjena in India probably helped her figure out a lot of her complex feelings around motherhood, but I don't feel like we got to see that. While in India, she spends so much of her time in a haze that there's not much room for her to consider her own feelings. And so, when the ending comes around and she's seemingly made peace with a lot of her problems from the first half of the book, it just felt unsatisfying.