I love Sandhya Menon. She's a brilliant YA romance writer and is clearly having a blast and that translates perfectly into her books.
The thing that she is so good at - and that is the reason this book is a five rather than a four - is that Menon GETS the difference between the arc of a romance and the tropes of a romance. Romance, as a narrative genre with a specific arc, is about getting (usually) two specific people who the reader has identified as belonging together to end up together by the end. (I know, duh.) When one deviates from the normal, straight, conventional stories, the arc of the romance draws along the characters and allows both the writer and the reader to imagine otherwise. I both feel very strongly that fiction ought not limit itself to what is appropriate in the real world and believe that we model what is possible in the world by what we see in fiction. So I'm all here for terrifying sulky men falling in love with their governesses--even though that's unlikely to be love in the real world--and note that if all the stories of arranged marriages are of people escaping them to find true love, it skews our perceptions of such things. Menon REALLY gets that and sets out to tell a story of arranged marriages that work out, of fat girls getting their hearts desires AND staying fat, a world that recognizes how romances shape the contours of our dreams and that this is no less ridiculous than the number of dukes who are also rakes in Regency England. (So many. Just...a gardening shed of dukes.)
The point, wherever it meandered off to, is that expansive tropes for the romance arc are amazing and I'm very much looking forward to reading more of them.