Hello everyone!
I am back with another book review, today it is The Trouble with Hating You by Sajni Patel. Thanks so much to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. As always, all opinions are my own.
**TRIGGER WARNING: This book deals with and discusses sexual assault, in particular with an underage character, and emotional and physical abuse. The author doesn't really get into specifics, and I won't discuss it more specifically in this review, but please proceed with caution.**
This book follows Liya, a biochemical engineer who is sick of her parents pushing her to get married. When she is unexpectedly set up on a "meet your prospective husband" dinner with her parents and Jay, a charming lawyer, she bolts. Literally. While Jay looks great on paper, and in person, she doesn't want to get married, which she knows is his, and their parents', end goal. But when Jay is hired as a lawyer at her struggling company, the two are forced to interact daily and Liya begins to wonder if she'll ever be able to stop running.
I'll be honest, it took me a bit to get used to the characters. Liya is truly an exceptional character who has been through so much but she is a little hard to endure for the first few chapters. I loved her outspokenness and ability to stand up for herself, but I think she takes a minute to get used to because she is so much more than the typical "feminist female lead." She's not just talk, she is action. Jay was really sweet and he was able to really connect with Liya but I was surprised to see how almost immediately he fell for her. There wasn't really much build up on his side of things, as there was with Liya, but I suppose that's reality.
What bits and pieces of the romance I did get, I enjoyed. From both their characters we see minimal discussion of their feelings, mostly the occasional internal thought and the steamy scenes are so fade to black I didn't even realize they had done anything in one case! I would have maybe liked to see that a bit more, to build up their chemistry outside of work and other life issues.
In the story more generally, I kept having to double-check that this wasn't a companion novel because the secondary characters' relationships seemed like they could have been addressed a bit more somewhere else - that book hasn't been written yet but maybe it's next on Patel's list? Either way, I would love to read about Jay's brother Jahn and his wife, Shilpa.
Overall, I think at the end of the day, I loved the smaller bits and pieces of this story, Jay's interactions with his family, Liya's girl group, the birth of Jay's nephew. But together, they didn't make a romance novel. They made a contemporary where the main characters happen to fall in love.