USA Today bestselling author Sonali Dev writes Bollywood-style love stories that explore issues faced by women around the world. Her novels have been named Best Books of the Year by Library Journal, NPR, the Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews. She has won the American Library Association's award for best romance, the RT Reviewer Choice Award for best contemporary romance, and multiple RT Seals of Excellence. She is a RITA finalist and has been listed for the Dublin Literary Award. Shelf Awareness calls her "Not only one of the best but one of the bravest romance novelists working today." She lives in Chicagoland with her husband, two visiting adult children, and the world's most perfect dog. You can find more of my reviews of Sonali Dev's works here.
No one can call Vansh Raje's life anything but charmed. Handsome—Vogue has declared him California's hottest single—and rich enough to spend all his time on missions to make the world a better place. Add to that a doting family and a contagiously sunny disposition and Vansh has made it halfway through his twenties without ever facing anything to throw him off his admittedly spectacular game. A couple years from turning forty, Knightlina (Naina) Kohli has just gotten out of a ten-year-long fake relationship with Vansh's brother and wants only one thing from her life... fine, two things. One, to have nothing to do with the unfairly blessed Raje family ever again. Two, to bring economic independence to millions of women in South Asia through her microfinance foundation and prove her father wrong about, well, everything. Just when Naina's dream is about to come to fruition, Vansh Raje shows up with her misguided Emma Project... And suddenly she's fighting him for funding and wondering if a friends-with-benefits arrangement that's as toe-curlingly hot as it is fun is worth risking her life's work for.
Austen once said about Emma that she would be a character no one else would much like except for herself. Emma is indeed rather unlikable, but redeemable by the end of the novel. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Vansh or Naina. Naina's character had a lot of potential to grow, but she wasn't slated as the Emma character to begin with, so it was quite upsetting that she seemed to be the one with the most unlikable character. Vansh, on the other hand, seems to have all of Emma's positive traits without doing the work Emma has to do to grow. In order for the retelling to have felt true to me, Naina, the Knightley-casted character, would have been a bit stronger as a character, and less of the main character than Vansh. I was excited for an Emma retelling with the male main character as the focus, or the one needing to do the most work, but by casting Naina as the main focus (despite alternating chapters) and then proceeding to make her character irredeemable, the retelling fell flat for me instead of being the innovative, unique retelling I had been expecting.
I was intrigued by the transplanted romance between Esha and Sid, the Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill characters. I looked forward to Esha's chapters, in fact, because they were more compelling than Vansh's and Naina's—at least, I felt like I could follow the story in Esha's point of view. Unfortunately, the romance between Esha and Sid wasn't balanced with Naina's and Vansh's, which makes sense: Jane and Frank aren't the focus of Emma, so Esha and Sid didn't stand a chance. However, the love stories for the two pairs were not balanced, begging the question of why Esha and Sid's was transplanted. Jane and Frank's relationship was a secret, so it wouldn't have been too strange not to include it. I liked how the addition of Esha's and Sid's stories made me question Frank's intentions, or at least pushed the boundaries on the possibilities of Frank's character. But, again, it just wasn't done in a way that felt satisfying, another point against the retelling in a frustrating way.
Another small note is how Hari's story felt unresolved. As the Harriet character, I was looking forward to seeing how his and Vansh's relationship would develop, and I felt like Hari was often forgotten about until key plot points, and then completely dropped at the end.
I might be described as an Austen purist based on my above points, but truly the most frustrating thing about this novel was the family dynamics. I quite liked in the first three novels how the relationships between the cousins, siblings, and Aunties were nuanced. In this one, though, the family characters felt hypocritical beyond reason against Naina. While Naina's character wasn't likable, it was hard reading the scenes where she interacted with Vansh's family, because they felt unfair beyond reason, and then they were very quickly persuaded to see reason in the second-to-last chapter or so. There was nothing satisfying about the resolution, and that was also due in part to the unbelievability of the romance itself. But reading how unsupportive the Rajes were of Naina's and Vansh's relationship was frustrating and disheartening.
While this novel did provide some interesting takes on Austen's Emma, I didn't feel satisfied by the ending; rather, I still feel conflicted about the novel itself, especially since I still enjoyed the previous books in the series. You can find more of my reviews of Sonali Dev's works here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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