Late Bloomers

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / Varadarajan, Deepa, Adult Book / Fiction / General / Varadarajan, Deepa
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Varadarajan, Deepa	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Varadarajan, Deepa	4-week checkout	Due 05-23-2024

"After thirty-six years of marriage, recently divorced Suresh and Lata Raman find themselves starting new paths in life. Suresh is trying to navigate the world of online dating on a website that caters to Indians and is striking out at every turn until he meets a mysterious, devastatingly attractive younger woman named Malika, who seems to be smitten with him. Meanwhile, Lata is enjoying her newfound indepedence after decades in an arranged marriage, but she's caught off guard when a professor in his early sixties starts to flirt with her. Priya, the former couple's unmarried daughter, thinks her father's online pursuits are distasteful but hides a secret affair of her own, while their son Nikesh pretends at a seemingly perfect marriage with his law-firm colleague and their young son, but hides the truth of what his relationship really entails"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Fun novel submitted by redwood on July 9, 2023, 12:39pm This light-spirited (but not insubstantial) new novel was a welcome break from the intense memoirs I’ve been reading. Late Bloomers, the debut novel from legal academic Deepa Varadarajan, follows a mostly Texas-based family of four. The parents, Suresh and Lata, both in their late fifties, have recently divorced after thirty-six years of marriage. Everyone’s still getting used to it—their two adult children, the local Indian community, and Suresh and Lata themselves.

The chapters shift in POV between the four family members. Suresh has been driving all over the South for dates with Indian women he meets online, all of whom are insufferable (and liars!). He has one promising date, but the woman ghosts him … and then suddenly reappears. Lata has her first-ever job at a university music library, where she befriends a snarky twenty-year old and gets asked on her very first date (scary!) by a kind jazz professor. Daughter Priya is a history professor in Austin; her parents think she’s too old to be single, but she’s been carrying on an affair with a married man. And son Nikesh is supposed to be the perfect one, a successful New York lawyer married with a gorgeous son—except it turns out that he hates his job and he and his son’s mother never actually got married. Each of these characters contends with finding their footing in relationships until they all collide at a chaotic birthday party.

Reading other reviews, it seems like people found these characters to be annoying, but to me, they felt recognizable and real, problematic beliefs and all. I grew up in a similar, small Indian community in a college town. Things like Suresh getting annoyed at all the self-important Indian male professors and Lata going grocery shopping on Sunday mornings when everyone is in church felt so familiar to me. And I also liked that the family was specifically and subtly Tamil—low bar, but so much content is either generically or specifically North Indian that this was a welcome change. I enjoyed alternatively laughing or rolling my eyes at these characters.