Late Bloomers was an interesting novel about coming-of-age but later in life, well passed when the types of issues, concerns, and emotions the characters went through are experienced. But what I found to be most interesting is how much our culture truly influences our lives and the continued impact it has on us later in life. Suresh and Lata got a firsthand view of that and how love is lost, won, and discovered. I believe for them it was eye-opening in more ways than one with each of them having so many regrets. Each of the Ramans is unique and special in their own way and their experiences are both heartbreaking but also relatable. Full of new beginnings, choices, and self-discovery, Late Bloomers is a great read about navigating love and starting over.

First of all let me start off by saying that I love, love, love reading books by diverse authors. Late Bloomers is the heart-warming and insightful story of, an Indian American couple who divorce after three decades of an arranged marriage. Seeking online dating for Suresh and a new relationship for Lata, they questions there new lives. This is a great story that is timeless and refreshing. I loved it! Thanks to netgalley for an advanced copy.

Late Bloomers follows four family members as they explore relationships and adult struggles. Suresh and Lata had an arranged marriage and recently divorced after decades together. Suresh entirely blames Lata for leaving him, while Lata thinks Suresh was always a horrible husband. Both are working out the kinks of dating new people. Priya is having an affair with a married man. Nikesh has a baby with a coworker, and family judgment ensues. All around, so so much family judgment without desire for understanding.

Deepa Varadarajan’s writing is excellent, but I can’t say I enjoyed this book much — all the characters are so unlikeable! They’re selfish and can’t see past their own issues to empathize with family members. I’d read another of Varadarajan’s books, but this one wasn’t for me.


Thank you to Random House for an ACR in exchange for my review.

I found Late Bloomers to be just ok. The concept and story were interesting, but I found it really hard to be interested in any of the characters or what happened to them. I'm always frustrated by books where major plot points could be easily resolved if the characters just talked to each other, and Late Bloomers was definitely one of those books. If you're not bothered by that, you would probably enjoy it, but if you find plots that are driven by lack of communication or miscommunication annoying, you should probably skip it.

This is a charming debut novel. We meet an Indian American family who's lives are in turmoil as they try to reconcile their lives after the divorce of the parents after a long arranged marriage. The kids seem to have had a pleasant childhood but it was most interesting to see how the older values of their parents affected them.
The book is a chaotic ride through their current circumstances with the mother establishing herself in a new job and making some quirky friends, and the father looking for love on internet dating.
The children have their own romantic challenges.
How they all interact and in some cases fail to interact is a roller coaster ride which I found quite enjoyable.
The writing and dialog was good. The plot was full of surprises at every turn. The characters were well done and I especially related to the females in the story
The ending was satisfying as well.
In reading multicultural books, I find joy in seeing the common feelings of humanity about love and family.
Highly recommend this book for readers looking for a "light" read with some bite ! You will laugh out loud and cry in your pillow.

[4.5 stars]
This debut family drama is told in a warm, funny voice that brought me back to many of the books I loved in 2022. An Indian couple (living in Texas) who divorce 36 years into an arranged marriage both venture into the dating world to sometimes funny and sometimes disastrous results while their 2 grown children, a son and daughter, are also going through struggles in their own lives. This is a story about second acts and pushing out of your comfort zone even when it’s scary. Amid this big change in the family, everyone acts out of character (including the grown children) - and the family has to come to terms with its “new normal.” I loved the commentary about marriage, relationships with adult children, and parenting adult children. It felt like a more light-hearted, less jaded, and less sarcastic version of Fleishman is in Trouble. The mix of humor, sentimentality, nostalgia, and warm-heartedness made this a standout debut for me.

Late Bloomers, by Deepa Varadarajan

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced readers copy of this book.

This delightful and insightful novel brings us a fractured family of four, and, in their different voices, shows how adult children and parents can renegotiate new ways of being with and for each other.

Suresh, 59, and Lata, 57, had an arranged marriage in their native India, and have lived in Texas since right after their wedding. But they were never compatible, and after 36 years, a well-to-do lifestyle, and with two grown children, Lata decides she wants a divorce. Lata, college-educated in India, now works as a library assistant at a local college, and moves away from their tight-knit Indian community – not far, but enough so that she no longer socializes with old friends. And given Suresh’s negative, critical, and often tactless comments, neither does he.

Suresh, a retired systems analyst, did not want the divorce, and it is he who introduces us to the situation, a year later, as he wryly describes his experiences with an Indian-singles dating site, about which Lata knows nothing. He relies for advice and encouragement on his son, Nikesh, 30 years old, a Harvard-educated attorney living in New York City, married to an older woman (and his boss at the law firm) with whom he has a one-year-old son.

Their grown daughter, Priya, 35, is a tenure-track professor of medieval history, teaching in Austin, about two hours from where she grew up. She is involved with a married man, about whom her family knows nothing, and this has created emotional distance the others do not understand.

Other well-drawn characters circle these four.

The book begins several weeks before the first birthday of Suresh’s and Lata’s grandson, Alok, and the various relationships come to a breaking point at the birthday party, where everyone is together, precipitating the need to find a new equilibrium for all.

The book deftly explores the issues of being the parents of adult children, and of the lies (what Suresh calls RDTs, “reasonable deviations from the truth”) and secrets we tell and keep in order to maintain our own self-images.

Highly recommended both for the pleasure of reading the story, and of thinking about the problems raised.

A wonderful, funny and insightful novel with deftly-drawn characters. Everything about this novel feels real -- the story line, the situations the people find themselves in and their reactions to them. Told in four distinct first-person voices, (father, mother, grown single daughter and married son), supporting characters are just as fully-realized and human (even the eight-year-old boy) as the central characters. There is a clear picture of each individual, their foibles, follies and desires. The family is from India, and their previous adaptation to life in Texas is part of the story, but not the central part. Complexed by their own lives, all are trying to make sense of them for the better.

The mother's story is so poignant. ("...I'd spent thirty-six years like a woman treading on a field of landmines.") But no character is slighted. (Commenting on the dating sites on the internet, Suresh, the father, declares "The sites seemed endless. Was there one for every flavor of desolation?") The care the author took creating people the reader cares about, all of them, makes this a fantastic read. And the insightfulness ("Parenting adults was so much harder than parenting children. Why didn't anyone ever tell you that?") must come from real life.

The persona and narrative are so polished, it's hard to believe this is a first novel. And the title of the book is perfect! I'm hoping this is just the first of many novels by Deepa Varadarajan.

I loved this book! The multiple POV storyline follows a family post divorce. The parents, Suresh and Lata have to navigate having independent lives after being married for decades. Their adult children have their own multitude of life events that are complex and difficult to navigate. This story shows how you can mess up, make scary choices and sometimes fail miserably and yet, life will still go on. This charming book will make you laugh, cry and probably cringe!
I highly recommend checking out this well written book, coming soon in May!

I want to thank @penguinrandomhouse @netgalley and @deepavaradara for the gifted copy! I enjoyed it immensely!

I loved this novel! This was such a fun unconventional family drama. There were some genuinely poignant moments and there were also moments that made me laugh out loud. I really enjoyed the dynamic of parents and children who are all adults and all very much still figuring things out. This is a quick read and a very enjoyable one.

Thank you to Netgalley & Random House for this ARC. I was immediately drawn the beautiful cover and was intrigued by the title. I love a good underdog moment.

This story follows a family in the aftermath of divorce by Lata and Suresh after 30+ years of marriage. Lata and Suresh's kids while seemingly fine, each have their own issues they are working through and everyone needs to have a moment to grow and bloom.

I really enjoyed Lata's character and I found myself rooting for her throughout. The other characters weren't super likable and I was frustrated with how selfish and in their own way they were.

I thought the story was well written but not my favorite.

DNF @ 21%

I really wanted to enjoy this one. Such an interesting blurb and alternating chapters definitely intrigued me.

However, overall, this one felt slow. I didn't feel like I was rooting for any of the characters as they all seemed problematic in their own way. There is also little action plotwise, but if you enjoy more character driven reads, this is definitely that.

I get life isn't perfect and we have to kind of live for ourselves but wish there was a little more warmth to this one besides quick laughs at the expense of others.

Thank you Random House and Netgalley for a free e-copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

What a surprise! This exceeded my expectations and was an enjoyable escape. A family dynamic uniquely flawed and forever changed, unlikable yet lovable personalities that are looking for the next transition in an unscripted life.Funny, maddening & totally relatable

I wanted to enjoy this book so much. I love reading about other cultures and their family dynamics and the premise caught my interest from the first time I saw it. The book started off well, I liked the different points of view and getting to know the main characters. However, if you start reading this book and expect it to be a story of growth and development, let me save you some time. Each character only became more selfish and self-centered as the story progressed. It was so frustrating to read this and not see any actual changes or lessons learned. I would almost say this is a family of narcissists. At the very least they were each way too immature and childish to be grown adults. I don't believe I am misunderstanding due to any sort of culture differences either. This was just plain self-absorbed behaviors. I would have preferred if the story arc didn't necessarily tie everything up, but at least showed more growth and understanding of their words and actions and how they affected others. I went from being interested and liking the characters to just wanting the story to be over. I'm going back and forth between two and three stars, I'd say its a 2.5 based solely on that at least, despite the characters and plot, it was written well.

Thank you so much to the author, publisher and NetGalley for this ARC!

I found this book very readable & enjoyed it more than I initially thought I would, which was a pleasant surprise. For those who enjoy more plot-driven books, this isn’t one of those novels; I definitely found it more character-driven. I was more invested in certain character’s storylines than others- namely Lata and Nikesh, I enjoyed the character of Priya, but she really didn’t have all that much going on plot-wise. Suresh was quite crotchety and unpleasant, but he was supposed to be. I really enjoyed that this story was partly told from the perspective of Lata and Suresh, an Indian couple who’d had an arranged marriage, and had gotten a late-in-life divorce after thirty-some years of marriage, because it’s not one that I often see in novels. For one, I haven’t read many novels that explore arranged marriage, & I also haven’t read many novels that talk about an older couple getting divorced and how it impacts the family dynamic. It was quite interesting but bittersweet to examine this dynamic- I think the sadness, hope, fear, and trepidation and uncertainty these characters were feeling was captured so well, especially through the mother Lata’s voice. She was an especially endearing character and I was rooting so hard for her happiness. I would have liked to see a bit more happen plot-wise, as it felt a little bit anticlimactic, but overall this felt like a gentle story- if that makes any sense. There isn’t a ton of darkness, no twists or shock value, but I really appreciated this story because it highlights the fact that we’re all really just doing our best, and that our parents are not perfect people and often make mistakes and stumble through life, just as much as we do as their children. Age doesn’t always mean wisdom, and we can’t expect to have everything figured out just because we’ve followed all the rules. This novel reiterated the message that it’s never too late to start over, and I loved seeing a woman take a stand & try to create a better, happier life for herself after being in an unhappy marriage for so many years, even though it might have scared her to her core. I could definitely relate to certain parts of this book- feeling some animosity towards your parents, that weird moment when you feel the role-reversal of having to take care of or worry about your parents when historically they’ve been the ones taking care of you. I loved that this wasn’t a perfect family and that not everything was resolved with a perfect little bow, because that wouldn’t have been realistic.

This novel focuses on a traditional Indian family transplanted in Texas and it begins after the mother, Lata, bravely leaves her 30+ year arranged marriage with Suresh. There are four perspectives that interchange throughout the novel - Lata, Suresh and their adult children Priya and Nikesh. Lata is just learning how to live alone while Suresh is trying online dating and Priya is dating a married man. Nikesh’s life looks perfect in Brooklyn with his wife and baby but when everyone (and I mean everyone) ends up in Lata’s apartment for Nikesh’s son’s first birthday all secrets are revealed and the family realizes nothing is what it seems and no one has their life together.

I enjoyed the general storyline and the romantic struggles of the characters, but I wanted to like this book more than I did. None of the characters really spoke to me except one of the ancillary characters (Lata’s friend at the library where she worked – who had the funniest lines in the book) because there was very little dimension or growth to the characters and the story was a bit predictable for me. However there was humor and warmth in the book that I did enjoy.

Thank you to Net Galley and Random House Publishing Group for providing me with the chance to review.

A heartfelt look at a family who is just trying to keep on keeping on! The characters were likeable and the author did a great job of each of the storylines and intertwining them in all the right spots! This was a quick read and a reminder that we don't always know what people are dealing with, no matter how things look on the surface and that love and family can overcome a lot when needed.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House Publishing, Random House for the ARC of this book.

Despite not usually being my genre of choice, I enjoyed this! It was interesting to read about an arranged marriage, and the characters were all well drawn, if not completely likable (I could have done with a few less Suresh chapters). I don't think it'll stick with me, but I'd recommend it to general fiction readers for sure and I would read another book by this author. I liked it - 3 stars.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House for sending me this ARC.

Late Bloomers is about a family of four, all suffering from a different issue in their personal romantic relationships. From online dating to pretending you are married to dating someone who is married, it really runs the gamut. It also dives into the relationships this mother/father/daughter/son group have with each other.

I felt that this novel was a little bit over dramatic with all of the romantic struggles befalling one family. However, the way all of the storylines played out was quite realistic and it was nice that there were still struggles at the end of the book.

✨Book Review✨
Late Bloomers by Deepa Varadarajan
4/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
PUB DATE: May 2, 2023

First thank you to @netgalley and @randomhouse for my eARC copy of this read for my honest review!

An Indian American family is turned upside down when the parents split up thirty-six years into their arranged marriage​ in this witty, big-hearted debut.

“Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, Late Bloomers is a charming story about starting over, stumbling, and finding yourself at any age.”—Jennifer Close, author of Marrying the Ketchups

I really enjoyed this debut. A good family drama. I could relate to the family dynamic all throughout. And I found that I was wishing the best for each family member all in their own way all the way to the end.

Chapters alternating between each family member was something I also enjoyed.

The only thing that irked me a was the ending was a bit rushed for my liking but overall did not ruin my enjoyment. I would like to read more from this author in the future.

If you like familial dramas. Keep this one on your radar in the coming months!

And as always, happy reading friends! 💕