Status
Call number
Collections
Publication
Description
Romance. Young Adult Fiction. Young Adult Literature. LGBTQIA+ (Fiction.) HTML:Everyone likes Humaira "Hani" Khan�??she�??s easy going and one of the most popular girls at school. But when she comes out to her friends as bisexual, they invalidate her identity, saying she can�??t be bi if she�??s only dated guys. Panicked, Hani blurts out that she�??s in a relationship�?�with a girl her friends absolutely hate�??Ishita "Ishu" Dey. Ishu is the complete opposite of Hani. She�??s an academic overachiever who hopes that becoming head girl will set her on the right track for college. But Ishita agrees to help Hani, if Hani will help her become more popular so that she stands a chance of being elected head girl. Despite their mutually beneficial pact, they start developing real feelings for each other. But relationships are complicated, and some people will do anything to stop two Bengali girls from achie… (more)
User reviews
The girls attend some of the same family events and are on each other’s radars because of that, but they don’t really interact beyond that. That is, until they both find themselves in need of a fake relationship; Hani in order to convince her friends that she is, in fact, bisexual, and Ishu because she needs to be more popular in order to be voted head girl at school.
The fake dating plotline is pretty run-of-the-mill, and I actually picked this up because that’s one of my favorite tropes. However, it wasn’t really what I enjoyed about this book, even though the romance was cute.
What I enjoyed a lot more were the discussions about friendship, family, faith, and expectations. Hani’s friends are entitled assholes who treat her like shit, and Hani is pretty much a doormat who’s incapable of having her own opinions. She grows a spine by the end, but she was a really frustrating character to read about. I did really like reading about how important Islam was in her life and what kind of difficulties she had with her so called friends because of her faith.
On the other end of the spectrum we had Ishu, who didn’t really care at all about what her peers thought of her, but her actions and decisions were basically dictated by her parents. Ishu’s big sister drops out of school at the beginning of the story, which causes a lot of tension with her parents, who basically shun her for her choices.
This was a really good read, but I feel like the romance was pretty heavily overshadowed by the bigger issues like biphobia, islamophobia, racism, and coping with the burden of familial expectations.