This book is messy, cerebral, deeply Muslim, and brutally honest. And while I didn’t always know where it was going—or even what was happening—I admire the ambition of its chaos.

In Liquid: A Love Story, Mariam Ramani crafts a biting, meandering portrait of a queer Iranian American academic caught at the intersection of structural precarity, inherited trauma, and romantic longing. The narrator, fresh off her PhD in a field her adjunct salary cannot sustain, embarks on a quest to locate a statistically significant spouse—one hundred dates, fourteen weeks—while dodging Islamophobia, parental expectations, and the emptiness of gig academia. The absurdity is intentional, and often funny, but what lingers most is the ache beneath the narrator’s dry wit.

Ramani’s prose is dense and self-aware, toggling between dissertation-like analysis and poetic reflection. References to Said’s Orientalism, the ethics of arranged marriage, and the politics of the hijab sit alongside awkward first dates and hot girl app fatigue. There are sapphic flings, the messy gravity of a best-friend situationship, and a syllabus on chick flicks that might’ve been my favorite subplot. The narrator’s dry, sardonic narration kept me hooked even when the plot felt like it was slipping through my fingers.

Around the halfway mark, the novel pivots hard. After her father’s heart attack, the narrator flies to Iran, where the tone and stakes change completely. The narrative slows down, becomes more embodied, more tender. The chaotic energy of the first half gives way to grief, inheritance, and ancestral longing. It’s jarring—but maybe necessarily so. Love, after all, isn’t tidy. Neither is diaspora.

Liquid never quite coalesced for me structurally, and I wish the transitions had been cleaner. But Ramani is doing something ambitious here: interrogating how capitalism, academia, and empire distort even our most intimate desires. If you’re okay with a little narrative disarray in exchange for big ideas and biting prose, this one’s worth wading into.

📖 Read this if you love: dry wit layered over emotional vulnerability, anti-capitalist academic fiction, and messy diasporic intimacy.

🔑 Key Themes: Islamophobia and Diaspora, Love and Financial Precarity, Academia and Class Tension, Queer Longing and Belonging, Marriage and Modernity.