When Hani tells her best friends that she’s bisexual, they don’t believe her. She’s never kissed a girl, so how could she know? Irritated, Hani claims to have a girlfriend, a fellow Bengali student named Ishu. Ishu isn’t her friend, much less her girlfriend, but it turns out Ishu needs Hani as well. Or rather, she needs Hani’s popularity to help her win the position of Head Girl to make her parents proud. Cue: fake dating that slowly becomes a lot more real over time.

While the romance in this one was cute, it was the deeper elements of the story that really stood out for me. Both Hani and Ishu struggle with their identities within their community and/or family. Hani’s friends treat her quite poorly for many things – her sexuality, her religion, her heritage – and yet she puts up with it because she doesn’t want to rock the boat. Ishu is more outspoken, but also more abrasive, so she’s alienated people, especially in her bid to please parents who will be happy with nothing except perfection on a path of their choice. The story is filled with racism, xenophobia, islamophobia, biphobia, homophobia, and borderline abuse by parents. So yeah, it has a really cute and lovely romance at its heart, but the book is so, so much more. Lovely reading.

Performance: The audiobook was narrated by Rena Dutt and Shubhangi Karmakar. I’m not sure which narrator performed which character, but both did an excellent job. Hani’s character, who was born and raised in Ireland, has an Irish accent. Ishu’s character, who came to Ireland as a young child, has both Irish and South Asian elements to her accent. The parts read in other languages – of which there were several – seemed to my untrained ear to be well-done. There was none of the whiny angst often heard in YA audio narrations. As you can probably tell, I’m not usually a fan of YA on audio, but this one was great!