A journalist of more than three decades, Minal Nirmala Khona knows a thing or two about writing. Little wonder then, that her debut novel is a rom com that knows exactly what it wants to be and gets there without fuss. Nandini and Shaurya meet, circle each other, and fall in love slowly. The complication is an old and reliable one. Shaurya is her brother's best friend, which puts the bro code squarely in the way, and he carries a commitment phobia that he isn't in a hurry to examine.

What lifts Every Star Leads to You above its premise is how much attention the author gives to everything happening around the romance. The relationships are the real draw. Siblings who needle each other and then show up when it counts. Friendships with their own history and cadence. Parents and children negotiating the distance between what they want for each other and what they say out loud. These threads aren't filler between the romantic beats. They're often the more interesting part of the page.

Minal also handles mental illness (the male protagonist suffers from a bi-polar disorder) with genuine grace. It isn't a plot device to be resolved by the right partner, and it isn't treated as a shadow over the lighter parts of the story. It sits within the book the way it sits in a life, acknowledged and lived with.


Then there's Mumbai, which functions as a character. The 1990s setting gives Minal room to write the city she clearly knows well, and that affinity shows in the texture of it. The places, the rhythms, the quality of a decade that now feels both recent and gone. Readers who remember that Mumbai will recognise it. Readers who don't will still get a strong sense of the place.

The narration is brisk throughout, which is a real asset. Minal Khona doesn't linger where she doesn't need to, and the book moves at a pace that carries you along whether the rom com is your usual shelf.

What a reader walks away is the warmth of a well-defined relationship, the leads are likeable and the relationship between them progresses naturally, which allows the reads to be invested in them and the supporting characters too, add to the flow of the narration. Everything comes together well, which is not a small thing for a first novel.

Worth picking up if you want something warm and well observed, with more going on underneath than the cover suggests.