Oof, I have SO many feelings about this book.
So, first of all, this book was a humiliation party and that is not my thing at. all. and also, what exactly did I expect from a story is based on Emma!? Still, this upped the level of shudder.
It somehow felt like Naina got all the upsetting parts of Emma and Knightley without the privileges of either. And, like, the gender swapped thing is cool and also "let's turn this character into a woman and also take away all his personal stability" was definitely a choice.
I wanted Naina to be more okay than she was. I wanted this to be about men actually needing to account for their behavior and it...wasn't.

Which brings me to the thing that I keep coming back to - romance novels are an amazing place to work through and talk about serious issues and also it can be tonally complicated because the romance pushes happy endings and both trauma and systemic problems don't lean towards that.
Like,

you will not fix San Francisco's homelessness problem with A FUCKING APP! Helping those who are unhoused is amazing and also, AN APP!? The techno-utopianism is frustrating in the extreme. Not to mention the "have you considered crowdfunding to replace your billionaire asshole?" I just...it's such an EMMA thing to assume and it should FAIL for that reason because

solving systemic problems getting coopted to build to a HEA for narrative convenience was incredibly frustrating and disappointing.

Not to be all "blah blah Austen" and yet “A little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labour” is not just about modesty, it's about scope. Austen is DEEPLY invested in the individual and the rise or fall of her characters has little impact on the rest of the world. It's their story.
The Rajes, on the other hand, are writing across continents and have the wealth and privilege to alter lives. And on the one hand, it makes them real and situates them in the world. It makes what they do matter and means they aren't totally out of touch. On the other hand...the number of lives riding on whether these people can bang and have feelings at the same time is disconcerting. And the ways in which these books are hopeful conservative is fascinating and also bothers me. So much of these books take the stance that "all our current problems are a few bad actors and if we can just get the right person into power, all of this will go away. All we need is the right governor, the right app, the right crowdfunding initiative. Everything is FINE the way it is if we just act smarter."
And yes, romance is fantasy, but this is not a fantasy I feel comfortable buying into.