None of my Muslim in Middle East, Europe or America are in an arranged marriage. Many of them are my age or older but also younger. Although there may be a certain pressure towards getting married, especially people my age will rather do what they want and when they want with their future and bodies. There may be matchmaker or relatives keen to help finding a match - and this is the case in my community as well - but turning marriage into the sole topic of concern of non-Western parents is largely cartoonish. Personally, I don´t believe it is such a terrific prospect, including among traditional families.
From this perspective, The Marriage Clock by Zara Raheem is misrepresenting and exaggerating things. A young lady from an Indian Muslim family, a teacher by career, living in LA, is facing an ultimatum from his family. She is the only child, 26, successful and in love with her profession, with a fairly amount of friends and pretty. In order to make her parents happy, she gave herself three months - 3! - to find a convenient match to get marry. Honestly, not even my conservative relatives in Boro Park will consider three months as a realistic timeline to get a serious partner for marriage.
But Leila Abid is doing her best and is dating assiduously: online matches, doctors, suggestions from relatives, even speed dating (which is for me the most distasteful way of matchmaking, but well...) To be honest, at a certain point it sounded like the timeline was misleading as the amount of time dedicated to a match or another was not topping up the final count of the weeks. Anyway, it is not so clear what the content of the potential man she was looking for, but for sure the looks were important. For a 26yo living in LA she sounded very childish, way too childish, no matter how conservative her family was. She was not living in a ghetto, but was exposed enough to media and books to look for more than love at first sight.
After trip to India to attend a cousin´s wedding, another misplaced love interest later, Leila returns back home, with the 3-month deadline looming, and while celebrating the 30-year wedding anniversary of her parents, she announced publicly her decision to first find her worth and her own path in life instead of letting other people define her through the eventual match offered. Well said, Leila, I am so happy for you!
All being said, the book is not so terribly sad and bad, and the ending gives hope. Just the entaglements and the awkwardness of the dates is largely disappointing. I am glad that in the last decade there is so much diversity into romance books, but maybe it is about time to go one step further and present normal people - as the big majority of the people my generation - looking for love, friendship and family bonds without the expectations of the large public for arranged marriage, naive women and monomanic overdominating mothers.
Rating: 2.5 stars
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