The Object of Your Affections

Starred review from January 1, 2019
Like she did in My Last Love Story (2018), Kothari uses baby-making as a means to explore themes of friendship and tradition. Paris Kahn Fraser is married to the very hot Neal, a Scottish Indian jewelry-designing baron who loves her unconventional approach to life. Her tumultuous upbringing, involving several sets of adoptive parents, left her convinced that family life was not for her. But she knows Neal wants children, and she wants that for him, too. A solution arrives in her estranged college friend, Naira Dalmia, who flies to New York for a friend's wedding and doesn't leave. After a scandal back in Mumbai that left her widowed and unmoored, Naira agrees to be a surrogate. Complications, of course, ensue, and Kothari manages to balance deeply complicated issues of marriage, feminism, and abandonment with enough aspirational escapism to make the book a lot of fun. Paris' dilemma is especially compelling as she comes to terms with her resistance to motherhood: is it a reaction to societal expectations of a "good wife," or past trauma? Kothari offers no easy answers, making this an especially good choice for women's-fiction book groups.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)