The Vibrant Years
Grade : B

The story of three generations of women play out in Sonali Dev’s The Vibrant Years, a lovely comedy featuring personal growth, hidden secrets, and family connections – and some of Dev’s narrative pitfalls. The overall result is definitely worthwhile but is perhaps a tad overlong.

The Florida-bound Desai women are bonded together by general affinity, one man and, once upon a time, one house. Lively, sexually forward Bindu Desai’s son, Ashish, married a conservative newscaster named Alisha – Aly - while they were both in college and he was studying engineering in Florida. For twenty-three years, widowed Bindu lives with Ashish, Aly and their daughter, Cullie, and when Ashish divorces Aly, Aly and Bindu choose to keep living together. After all, they’re the best of friends. But then an argument and a sudden, million dollar windfall changes Bindu’s life.

The million dollars is a bequest from Oscar Seth, a famous director who cast Bindu in a very scandalous Bollywood film when they were romantically united in her youth (and he was also very married and much older than her seventeen years, yikes!). The release of the sexually explicit movie in which Bindu appears nude would utterly ruin her standing in the community and as a staid doctor’s wife, and so she has participated in its repression. Bindu wants to bury that lead as to why the movie was never released in Oscar’s lifetime even further and so she quickly spends the money given to her on a condo in a retirement community. While there her rebellious ways immediately irk the Home Owner’s Association. But Bindu’s secrets keep popping out of the closet – along with Oscar’s handsome grandson, Rishi Seth, who wants to make a documentary about the movie.

Bindu’s decision to move shocks Aly to the core, but makes her realize she’s been spinning her wheels since her divorce from Ashish. She’s stuck in a minor role at her station and due to ageism and racism has been denied an anchorship or a major reporting role, with everyone presuming she was a ‘diversity hire’ for the past ten years. When she hears that the networks’ loss of a sponsor is set to deny her a promised career advancement, she regrets pouring herself into her work in the wake of her divorce. Aly decides to sue the station for discrimination. But she keeps circling back to Ashish and their love…

Cullie lives in San Francisco and is a baby tech genius; she has developed a successful ap called Shloka, which helps her and millions of others cope with anxiety. Unfortunately, her own messy love life – an affair with a married man when she was too young – has added to her angst. CJ, who runs the startup that helped her bring Shloka to life, always promised Cullie they’d keep it free, but she wants them to turn to a subscriber-based situation so she can finally get her investment back. The startup’s board outvotes Cullie, who refuses to paywall the app, and CJ simply says she needs something to make cash off of. Cullie impulsively pitches a dating app although she has no coding prepared for it nor any plan to make it real. CJ agrees that if Cullie codes and creates the app and sells it to them, then they will keep Shloka free to use. A chance encounter with ER doc Rohan turns into love at first sight, but he keeps pushing Cullie away

Everything changes when one of Bindu’s dates – which happens to be with a famous author - ends when her lover dies post-orgasm while on top of her, in bed. Cullie and Aly arrive to support Bindu. Desperate for guinea pigs for the dating app, Cullie decides it on herself, her mother, and her grandmother. Cue the Desai ladies’ plunge back into the dating pool, for better or for worse…

The fact that everything I’ve described feels like it ought to be the main thrust of the novel’s plot – and isn’t – says something about The Vibrant Years. Most of the novel focuses on the three Desai women’s pursuit of love, sex and happiness, but much of it is wrapped up in Bindu’s grappling with her scandalous past, which sometimes gets a little tedious and is told in a florid, overheated manner. And yet she is absolutely my favorite character in the book – she’s filled with spirt, spunk and liveliness and is absolutely wonderful. I want to be like her when I’m sixty. And I really liked her choice to fully shed her shame.

Aly is more vague, someone to whom life generally happens, and I really didn’t get he romance with Ashish at all. Her plotline – which is amazingly trenchant and happens to so many women in real life – feels underwritten, with more attention paid to Bindu’s dramatics and Cullie’s mysterious love.

Cullie’s romance is definitely the most traditional, and I really enjoyed her love story and her struggle to free her app from the clutches of evil. There’s a great twist to that plotline mid-stream and I will reveal nothing about it here.

This novel has a lot of lovely things to say about discrimination, about ageism, about sexuality and how it ought to be enjoyed to its fullest. Those are among the reasons why The Vibrant Years lands at a solid B.

Reviewed by Lisa Fernandes
Grade : B
Book Type: Women's Fiction

Sensuality: Warm

Review Date : February 13, 2023

Publication Date: 12/2022

Review Tags: AoC PoC

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Lisa Fernandes

Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
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