The problem with romance novel series is that you get into them and then you find yourself reading a book that you're kind of meh on the premise.
There were two tropes this book used that frustrated me. One is one that I sometimes like and I think I'm just deeply bored with - "they knew each other back when and left each other and now must rebuild!" and, like, sometimes I just wonder why "this person treated me terribly, let's try that again!" makes so much sense to so many people that I keep reading it. Idk, I might just be in a "mehhhh" place or I just need to accept that I am a "fake-dating," "there was only one bed" and "arranged marriage" person and that's the way it goes.
The other thing that deeply bothered me is

that India was working as his therapist and should not have been in a relationship with him at any point because that's terrifying and wonky and my rabbi brain absolutely hates it and also it plays into the "women rescue men from their feelings" problem and I just cannot with it and that threw off the whole thing for me.

Which is a shame, as Paul Hollywood would say, because I love the premise and I really like the Rajes overall. This one, though. I got into it at the end, but it wasn't as much for me as Recipe for Persuasion.

Also a sweet story, also ran into one of my "I am made deeply uncomfortable by the way these characters are behaving and I need to take a break" moments because I dislike sudden outbursts even though Zabo did a good job telegraphing that it was coming, I wanted more obvious scenes of conflict. Or...something.
I can never articulate why my "are humans really like that?" alarm goes off for some behavior but not others. It would be so useful to know but I just don't.
The coffee puns were horribly excellent, though, I must say.

It's not like this was bad or anything, but let me list my reasons for the rating:
1 - "We were great in high school but then everything felt apart" is such a hit or miss trope for me. This one...glanced, I suppose. Like, they were fine, but the balance between "the screw-ups need to be real" and "the screw-ups need to be survivable" was a bit wobbly.
2 - A certain amount of "the plot needs you to be an ass right now" and I was annoyed.
3 - 99 -  I'm lowkey obsessed with Justin and Eli and these two were not them. 
Which, fine, that is the way that the genre works. New book, new couple.
But fewer of my buttons were pushed this time around.

I…feel like a bit of a weasel “this book is important, but reading it was a slog” is like such a half-assed review. 
What’s interesting about it in particular is the cultural construction of feminisms, which Eltahawy is obviously aware of and also elides because she’s interested in the ways that, when Black feminists say something that resonates with her, she can use it to continue constructing her feminism. (A good thing; she’s very conscientious about redeeming the world by giving credit where it’s due.) But it means that this book ends up being an investigation into feminism, which took root in Islam and grew elsewhere. And it was very clear where she had spent time forging solidarity and where she hadn’t. Which, again, not a knock on her, she’s done a LOT. But as a book, it’s got a very specific stance and isn’t thinking about what that stance looks like when other people stand in it. (The two that stood out for me were disability as nearly absent and trans people as subjects rather than objects of pity.) Eltahawy absolutely didn’t need to engage with them, but the universal prescriptivism of the book felt like it needed more awareness or less “this is the way”. 
But, like, fine. Not the reason for the rating. The point is that this book is eight essays and they are all the same style and it was…exhausting. Sometimes she got me to reach righteous anger, but mostly I felt like every new chapter was just the same chapter as before with different anecdotes, but the same point. The split into seven sins didn’t really work for me because it felt like there were three—power, violence, and lust—where she had something different to say and even then the arc just never varied. 
It’s not that this book could have been an article, although this framework would have worked much better as one. It just could have been a better book. 

Corporate banging continues, kink intensifies, there may not be ethical consumption under late capitalism, but at least the sex can be a model of consent. *slaps side of book* this baby can hold so much trauma in it. 
Let’s talk about the Jewish and disability rep in this book. I think I caught one minor mistake in practice (no blessing on the mezuzah except when it’s first hung, fwiw), but otherwise…yeah, Zabo did an excellent job with the story of how observant Judaism pushes queer people away. I realize this was not the point of the story, but I wanted more about Eli’s Jewish journey. Did he go straight to the Reform community or did he struggle to accept any non-orthodoxesque practice as legitimate? How does he see himself?

Did Justin convert? Was this an interfaith wedding and how did the Jewish community react either way? Look, I’m a rabbi, of course I want to know these things

And while I can speak less from the inside about this, Eli’s disability also felt very real and vivid. It was something that was always present, but rarely at the forefront. But it was clearly part of Eli’s identity. Also, Zabo gets the way that mobility aids are also art and part of the body. It felt like they handled that really well. 
Anyway, an ABSOLUTE delight, even better than the last one.

Neolithic Sheep, you are a gentleman and a scholar, thank you for publicly recommending romances on twitter. 
Anyway, it was contemporary romance, but I forgive it because it was both kinky and gay and thus meant that I was unlikely to run into the bug bears of contemporary romance…this man thinks controlling women is sexy. Also, like I said, Shep has no idea who I am, but he’s a trustworthy soul on twitter so I expected this to be fine. 
I, somehow, didn’t expect it to be as much fun as it was. Zabo’s characters are a delight.
But, in the ongoing essay that I’m writing about romance novels one review at a time, this one basically exemplifies the point I was making…last year/two weeks ago about principles. Zabo has very strong feelings about how their characters will be and do good, what it means to make ethical choices in an non-ethical world, and the extent to which this conversation extends. In many ways, it’s a conversation about individual morality. At no point, e.g., do we touch on any of these companies’ environmental impact or relationship to manufacturing. And there’s no reason to, except that Zabo is DEEPLY concerned about their characters deserving-ness. Both Michael and Sam consistently do the right thing in the cutthroat world of capitalist business practices…which is great, obviously we’re not rooting for dickwidgets, but the fantasy of romance that consistent ethical behavior gets rewarded just, it makes me really happy. 
There’s a SUPER interesting conversation to be had between Alexis Hall’s Arden St. Ives series and this one about business, kink, consent, and power and how Hall and Zabo respectively negotiate it. 
What Zabo has done here is created the equivalent of Regency romance ™ for 21st century American corporate culture. The interplay between the extremely well researched details that get the reader in the right place and the wildly idealistic possibilities open to the main characters matches beautifully. Not to mention, again, the ongoing lack of questions about where the wealth comes from and what it is doing.
I want more books in magical fantasy versions of reality where all the men are good looking, all the power brokers are kind, and all the penises are above average.

I'm not going to call this fanfiction, unless you want to make the argument that all literature is fanfiction of HKBH's Canon and I...okay, no, backtracking this.
Fanfiction has elevated the narrative stance where the story worth telling is not based on the level of conflict involved, but on the somewhat straightforward path from feeling less happy to more happy. Or the "someone give that cinnamon roll a hug" approach.
Fanfiction mostly does this because contemporary media (specifically for the screen) can be an absolute misery fest, especially for queer characters, and so fan-created content becomes a way to fight back against the tragedy that is the canonical lot and so the arc is from darkness into light, a pretty straightforward line up.
Ottoman's book takes the stories that are told about being queer in historical times, which are often an absolute misery fest, and writes a straightforward story about queer people falling in love and a world that just keeps getting better for them. Also having extremely good sex.
And that's the entire point; a fix-it-fic for a multiplicity of narratives that think that being trans in particular means being miserable. Anyway, it was extremely sweet.

OOF.
The interesting about this book is that if it wasn't a romance novel, it would be a devastating story of late-autism diagnosis and the tension between how learning that one is autistic provides meaning and context to one's own experience and creates tension and fear among one's family in particular.
Also, like, this book is a LOT. Like half a semester of pastoral classes that I took in rabbinical school worth of a lot. 
The fact that it works at all as a romance novel where you are rooting for the characters to get together and actually care that they bang is a testament to, well, the power of genre to direct attention and also Hoang's growth as a writer. She was quite fine in the Kiss Quotient, but this is a level up for her as a writer.
It was a READ, though. Probably less of one for someone who hadn't recently herself been diagnosed with autism.

This is live Cluedo with lesbians. That, incidentally, is the recommendation. (And despite being American, I say Cluedo because Hall is basing it on the British version of the game and yes I looked up the differences.)
It’s not as fluffy as Hall’s usual romances because it’s not, at heart, a romance even if it is a story about love. 
Hall does something very interesting here in

the way he walks the line between mystery is interesting and murder is banal. It works; he doesn’t entirely undermine the idea of the genre even as he consistently wobbles its premises. It’s a book that can only have been written in response to true crime and Serial and Hall is very deft at what he does. The downside, of course, in cheerfully undermining the genre that you are writing, is that the reading experience itself takes on a certain amount of ironic detachment, which prevents immersion

.
I still can’t believe Hall got away with this book and also it’s precisely the kind of thing he could pull off.

 …technically I finished this before midnight, but it was already the first shabbos of 2022 so we’re calling it book 1 of a new year. 
Anyway, this was a gorgeous story collection. As with any collection, there were stories I loved more, but none of them missed the mark for me, which was pretty impressive. 
My absolute favorite was Maria Dahvana Headley’s, which I finished and then had to walk away and stop to process it. I love her sense of how to retell a story (why haven’t I gotten around to her Beowulf yet??) It was brilliant. 
But the whole collection was precisely what I wanted. 
Definitely the way I wanted to begin the year.