The Wedding Season (Su Dharmapala, S&S)

In The Wedding Season, a Sri Lanka-born, Australia-raised woman tries to find true love while avoiding her mother’s matchmaking. Shani has a good job as an accountant, lives in her own place, has a great group of friends and is at the perfect time to meet her future husband—according to her horoscope. She sets her mother what she thinks is an impossible task—find 101 Sri Lankan men who match all her criteria, and Shani will meet them. What will happen when her mother actually does it? And how will Shani meet 101 guys and keep her job on track, her house in one piece and look after her friends? Su Dharmapala takes care to explain many Sri Lankan customs, although a lot of the phrases are left to be interpreted by context. I certainly had to concentrate when reading in order to tell the various characters apart, to work out the relationships between people and in particular, to follow the sequence of events leading up to the big disaster. The Wedding Season is a reasonable example of chick-lit, with a very Melbourne setting.

Jessica Broadbent is a former bookseller who is now a qualified librarian

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Category: Reviews