An Inter-Cultural Romance That Will Give The Readers An In Depth Look At The Indian Culture <3 | ARC Review: The Marriage Code by Brooke Burroughs

In Brooke Burroughs’s endearing debut novel set in vibrant India, enemies turned allies encounter obstacles in an unexpected multicultural romance only to discover that in the end, love is love.

Emma has always lived her life according to a plan. But after turning down her boyfriend’s proposal, everything starts to crumble. In an effort to save the one thing she cares about—her job—she must recruit her colleague, Rishi, to be on her development team…only she may or may not have received the position he was promised. (She did.)

Rishi cannot believe that he got passed over for promotion. To make matters worse, not only does his job require him to return home to Bangalore with his nemesis, Emma, but his parents now expect him to choose a bride and get married. So, when Emma makes him an offer—join her team, and she’ll write an algorithm to find him the perfect bride—he reluctantly accepts.

Neither of them expect her marriage code to work so well—or to fall for one another—which leads Emma and Rishi to wonder if leaving fate up to formulas is really an equation for lasting love.

A sweet debut that was romantic and entertaining in ways an Indian reader like me definitely enjoyed.

Rishi, who has lived in the States for a while hasn’t exactly been connected to his traditional roots in India. Though, after his familial clashes after his brother married a woman his Indian parents didn’t approve of.

So, he knows that he will follow his parent’s heart and marry the traditional Indian bride and even builds a whole search engine to help him with just that.

But what he didn’t expect was that the American woman, Emma who is the bane of his existence and who stole his job, is never far away from his mind.

The Marriage Code is amalgamation of two cultures coming together – however, the author did focus the extra attention on the Indian Culture, which per say isn’t a bad thing, in theory.

But this attention to the minute details of the Indian Culture pretty much dragged the book from it core – the romance between Emma and Rishi – and ended up dragging the book, enough so that there were times when I actually wished I could keep it aside.

Only my interested in Rishi and Emma’s enemies to lovers subtle shift had me persevering through the book.