Kavitha’s words come back to her: She and her aunt are so similar, both unable to move past their own sorrow. Grief is a type of myopia, a way of seeing the world in negatives, the empty spaces sharp and clear, the full ones blurry and overlooked. Simran couldn’t see how much she hurt the people around her because it felt like her wound was the biggest. It was so large, it swallowed her whole. And the same thing had happened with Veena perima.
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Table of Contents
Why Leave and Come Back?
I first saw Leave and Come Back on a list of new books that bookshop.org sent out on the 16th of June, 2026. I have been in the mood for contemporary romance lately and so a debut romance novel caught my eye and when I read the description of the book I immediately placed a library hold on the book. I was intrigued by a romantic comedy and family drama inspired by Bollywood movies from my childhood.
My hold came in at the beginning of July and I picked it up this past weekend. This is my first time reading anything by Lavanya Lakshmi. Blurbs on the paperback edition I read (ISBN/UID – 9780385700139) are from Annabel Monaghan, Hannah Bonam-Young, and Jessica Joyce.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
Leave and Come Back is a combination of romantic comedy and family drama – or as one of the characters in the book calls it – a rom-com-fam-dram. It follows the story of one Simran Gopal who is living out a romance with love of her life Leo Bridgers which is interrupted when she gets a invitation to her cousin’s wedding.
The story is for the most part told from the perspective of Simran with a few chapters of Leo’s perspective sprinkled in throughout to keep things interesting. It definitely felt like the author wanted to keep the focus on Simran and her interactions, I never felt particularly invested in Leo as a character, partially because he just didn’t get as much first-person page time as Simran did.
Leo as a character felt almost too perfect of a person to be a realistic love interest. It felt like he was there to say all the right things to prod Simran into reconnecting with her family and to perform rom-com tropes rather than a fully fleshed out character of his own. I didn’t dislike him but I was not particularly into him either.
The book starts off with Simran in Toronto but then quickly transitions to her family’s home in New Jersey where it stays for the rest of the book. The timeline is the two weeks leading up to the wedding. Leo happens to crash the engagement party and the rest of the book is trying to trick Simran’s aunt Veena into liking Leo and making sure she doesn’t find out that Leo and Simran are already a Thing.
Now for some cultural context – this particular premise is heavily inspired by a Bollywood rom-com-fam-dram from 1995 called Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge starring the inimitable Shah Rukh Khan as the male lead Raj and the gorgeous Kajol as the female lead Simran. I am fairly sure the last time I actually saw this movie was on VHS tape nearly two decades ago but the songs from this movie are very memorable and its a veritable classic as far as I am concerned.
In keeping with this inspiration, the female main character of this book is also named Simran and along with her cousin and childhood best friend Kavitha who is also a big fan of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge or DDLJ for short. Hence the operation to ingratiate Leo in the eyes of Veena being called Operation DDLJ. The two Iyer cousins, Geeta and Kavitha along with Geeta’s bride to be Rishi and of course Leo and Simran are all in on this operation.
All of these rom-com hijinks are very fun to read about but if Leave and Come Back had just been that I wouldn’t have liked it as much as I did. That is just the tip of the iceberg here, what is underneath is a story of Simran coming to terms with her grief and how it has lead to her relationship with her adoptive mother Veena and her cousin Kavitha to fester into estrangement.
Simran lost both of her parents to a car accident when she was very young at which point she left her home in Chennai, India and moved to New Jersey with her aunt Veena, her uncle Ashok and their two daughters Geeta and Kavitha. This childhood grief is something that Simran has carried into her adult life and it is something that affects all her relationships, including the one with Leo.
Leave and Come Back uses the fun lens of a romantic comedy to explore the nuances of familial relationships and how they can be affected by grief. The quote at the beginning of this review says it better than I could. It is a heartfelt story of two people across generations both understanding that their grief is more similar than it is different and moving forward from there. I was genuinely quite moved by this aspect of the story and I think that is where this book really shines.
Concluding Thoughts
I came into Leave and Come Back expecting a goofy fun time with a romantic comedy which I got but I also got a thoughtfully exploration of grief and familial estrangement. I had a fantastic time, this book had me both laughing out loud at the various hijinks and then tearing up at an emotional conversation between Simran and one of her relatives.
This is definitely a better than average debut and I very much want to read more of Lavanya Lakshmi’s writing in the future, especially if she is going to be writing more stories like this. I am very much enjoying the variety of South Asian representation I am getting in my fiction right now. More like this please!
That’s all from me, see y’all in the next one!
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