Liya Thakkar is a biochemical engineer who’s fending off her parents’ attempts to get her married. One evening, she shows up for what she thinks is a family dinner, only to find out that they’ve invited Jay Shah and his mother to meet with her about the possibility of marriage. Liya escapes… literally knocking Jay off his feet in an insta-hate meet-cute… and thinks the matter is settled. Except Jay also happens to be the lawyer hired to save her struggling company, and he’s angry at her rejection not just of him, but of his beloved mother.

The Trouble with Hating You is an enemies-to-lovers romance that explores how our pasts inform how we respond to the possibility of finding love. I absolutely love the complexity of the backstory around Liya’s family and community. I felt for Liya’s mother, who had subsumed her own desires to be the traditional obedient wife to her domineering, emotionally abusive husband. Without giving away spoilers, the story ends with a touch of hope for Liya’s mother, that isn’t quite the full 180 degree liberation I’d hoped for, but is at least both realistic and very much welcome.

I also felt for Liya, who is dealing with the widespread censure within her family’s community because of her lifestyle (she lives alone and away from her parents, she has sex outside of marriage, and so on). There’s also a traumatic incident in her past that makes it difficult for Liya to trust men, especially when her father blames her rather than the actual perpetrator for the incident. I felt for Liya, and for how difficult it must have been like for her to grow up while dealing with this experience and being unable to find support within her own family. I really liked her circle of friends, and I also liked how she warmed up to Jay’s mother before she even warmed up to Jay himself.

Jay also has a heartbreaking backstory — he blames himself for a family member’s death, and so tries to make up for his guilt by taking especially good care of his mother. I love this, because it shows how important family is to him. I especially love how Liya’s rejection hurt him not so much for himself, but rather because he could see how much it hurt his mother, and how much his mother blamed herself for whatever slight imperfection must have caused Liya to run away from them.

Jay is a sweet, super caring hero, who is patient with Liya’s prickliness towards him even before he learns the reason behind it. There’s a really heartwarming scene where he sees Liya working late in the lab, and voluntarily stays with her all night, cleaning test tubes and doing other menial tasks, just so she won’t be alone. This is before they even get together, which makes it especially sweet, and shows the kind of person Jay is.

Liya is a bit harder to connect with. I can understand her defensiveness given her backstory, and I can understand why her parents’ example makes her fight so hard against the possibility of getting married. I’m all for complicated heroines, and I can definitely respect her ambition and drive. The thing is, her prickliness often crossed the line to being downright mean, and past the halfway point, considering how sweet and kind Jay had been throughout the book, Liya’s continued prickliness towards him began to annoy me. It was hard for me to understand what Jay saw in her that made him continue to fall in love.

There’s also this moment where Liya, a manager who supervises a group of biochemical engineers, notices that her employees are slacking off. Instead of talking with them about it, perhaps feeling out if it’s the uncertainty of their company’s future that’s making them lose motivation, Liya instead stays overnight to do their work herself. When her employees come back the next morning and ask if this means she’ll be taking the day off, she responds that she’ll actually go back to doing her own work now that she’s done theirs. Liya’s rationale, which both Jay and the book seem to find admirable (her employees shape up after that), is that she wants to lead by example, and show her staff that she’s not above getting her own hands dirty with non-managerial work. Except this solution struck me as incredibly passive-aggressive, and honestly, if I were one of her employees, this would piss me off.

The story overall was entertaining, and, as I said, I really enjoyed all the complex plot threads about Liya and Jay’s families. The romance was both sweet and steamy, but didn’t quite hook me as much. I did like the ending, and how even after falling in love, Liya continued to keep her career a priority.

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Thank you to Forever Romance and Hachette Book Group Canada for an e-galley in exchange for an honest review.

The City We Became is a full-out, unapologetic, in-your-face homage to New York City. In it, five New Yorkers are ‘reborn’ into the living embodiments of the five NYC boroughs. They must band together and find the living embodiment of New York as a single, wholly encompassing city, so that they can defeat the Woman in White, an other-dimensional being determined to stop New York City from being ‘born.’

I’m a huge fan of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. I find her books brilliant — they’re multilayered and reveal more with each re-reading. The City We Became is such a book. It made me wish I grew up in New York City, or even that I just lived there now. The characters felt real, but I think they will also resonate much more strongly for those with an emotional connection to NYC.

First, there’s Manny (Manhattan), the brash and charming ethnically ambiguous newcomer who finds power in a cab ride and in dollar bills. There’s Brooklyn, the badass Black city council member who used to be a rapper and who lives in a brownstone with her dad and daughter. There’s Bronca (Bronx), the Lenape arts centre administrator, who’s the only one of the five that was ‘reborn’ knowing the group’s history and purpose. There’s Padmini (Queens), the mathematician from Chennai who is in NYC on a student visa. And finally there’s Aislynn (Staten Island), the timid white woman who is scared to take the ferry into the city, and who grew up with a lot of prejudices about immigrant and persons of colour.

Each of these characters is so vividly drawn, both as human beings and as allegories for the boroughs they represent. I love how each of them draws power from something that’s rooted in the spirit of their respective boroughs (e.g. the brownstone for Brooklyn, the apartment complex of immigrants for Padmini), and how all of these come into play in the story.

I also love how the villainous Woman in White sinks her tentacles into the city both literally and figuratively. Literal tentacles destroy the Williamsburg bridge and cause a traffic jam on FDR Drive, but more significantly, the Woman in White also buys up real estate to turn into condos or coffee shops. In one scene, the heroes recognize the Woman in White’s influence when they see a Starbucks where a beloved community space used to be. The Woman in White also goes after Bronca’s art centre by offering a huge sum of money for the centre to display racist and misogynistic artwork by a group of alt-right white men. The symbolism can feel a bit heavy handed, but on the other hand, everything also somehow works together, and as someone who lives in a city, so many of the story’s touchpoints struck a chord in me.

On one level, The City We Became is a gripping urban fantasy, where the city’s champions/avatars fight to protect their home from an alien invasion. But on another, deeper level, it’s also about the way cities grow and develop identities. Jemisin’s New York City is not a land area with buildings and cars, but rather a living, breathing entity. I love that her vision incorporates the distinct identities of each borough, while still bringing them together into a cohesive, yet never singular, whole. Jemisin’s love for the city shines through with every page. I loved the New York City she portrayed, and I can only imagine how much more powerful this book would be for actual New Yorkers.

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Thank you to Hachette Book Group Canada for an egalley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Boyfriend Project starts off with the heroine Samiah Brooks, a super smart techie who heads her company’s outreach efforts and dreams of developing her own app, learning through Twitter that the guy she’s dating was also dating two other women. The reveal is hilarious (the jerk took them to the same sushi restaurant!), the confrontation epic. Unfortunately, it also made Samiah go viral, and soured her on letting any man dupe her again.

Enter Daniel Collins, a biracial man (Korean-American and African-American), who investigates financial crimes and has gone undercover in Samiah’s company. The sparks between them are immediate, the flirty banter super cute, and despite Samiah’s initial reservations, she finds herself opening up to Daniel and allowing herself to fall in love with him. Except Daniel’s only in town for his assignment, he can’t tell Samiah the truth about what he does, and he knows that he will inevitably break Samiah’s heart someday.

The Boyfriend Project mixes so much of what I love in romance: fantastic chemistry, nerdy protagonists, kickass female friendships, and a conflict that is inevitable despite being neither character’s fault. I love the way Samiah and Daniel’s relationship developed, how both characters did their best to fight their feelings for each other (Samiah because she’d vowed to take a break from dating, Daniel because he knew he was lying to Samiah about who he was), and how they ended up ultimately being unable to resist each other. Rochon writes chemistry wonderfully, and I was right there with both Samiah and Daniel through their whole roller coaster of emotions.

The conflict was really well done as well. Part of me could see Samiah falling in deeper with Daniel and really wanting Daniel to just tell her the truth already, but another part of me understood why he couldn’t. The whole situation hurtles towards a point where he has to perform an outright betrayal in order to get his job done, and my heart broke right with Samiah’s at the inevitable reveal. The conflict is angsty and emotional and oh-so-absolutely-gripping. I kept wanting to see how the characters could work their way past the situation, and kept longing for the inevitable happily ever after. Part of me did feel that the resolution felt a tad too easy given all the build-up, but I also really liked how reasonable and empathetic both characters were in seeing each other’s positions, and how well they ultimately communicated with each other.

I also like how kickass both Samiah and Daniel were at their jobs. Both are super smart techie developers and great at what they do. There’s a scene where Samiah admits she initially hesitated to tell Daniel about the app she’s developing as a passion project, because she knows he has the skills and technical know-how to steal her idea, and I really liked that, because it shows how well-matched they are on an intellectual level.

There are also moments where Samiah talks about the challenges of being a Black woman in the tech industry, how she has to work harder than her colleagues to get the same level of success, and how her teachers often discouraged her from being too ambitious. She also talks about how she feels the pressure not to screw up any opportunities for other Black women who’ll be coming in after her, and how important it is for her to give young Black girls the opportunity to see her at work and know that they can aspire to something similar. I’m not Black, so I can’t fully understand what she experiences, but I do appreciate how Rochon explores this subject, and I really love this part of the story. There’s a great scene where Daniel admits that being part Asian affords him some privilege in the tech industry — it’s still racism, with the stereotype of Asians being smart in math and tech, but I love how Daniel and Samiah discuss these subjects so openly.

Finally, the friendship between Samiah, Taylor and London — the three women duped by the same man at the beginning of this book — was a major highlight of this book, and a fantastic setup for the series. I love how they initially bonded over the jerk who duped them, and how their friendship developed since then to weekly Friday dates and real, deep conversations about their lives. I love that the three women banded together to encourage each other to pursue their respective dreams beyond romance. I especially love that despite Samiah reneging on their agreed-upon ‘Boyfriend Project’ (a dating hiatus), Taylor and London didn’t make her feel bad about it, and instead were super supportive of her developing feelings for Daniel. I love romances that highlight the strength of friendship between woman, and I’m excited to see how Taylor and London’s stories turn out.

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Thank you to Forever Romance for an egalley of this book in exchange for an honest review.