she's somehow Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, and we love her for it

I’m kind of confused with this book. If we take out the romance storyline it’s a great book about family and doing what is to keep them happy and healthy. I loved this part of the book. Now looking at the romance storyline, it doesn’t make sense. I normally love a good enemies to lovers but there was no indication that there were any feelings on one side of this relationship, and all of a sudden they were together. The way the two of them spoke to each other I don’t know why they acted that way if they liked each other. 

Picked this up on a whim because of the title. Don’t know if I agree on it being so heavily P&P-esque as it is an enemies to lovers narrative. How they became lovers? That part still eludes me as I don’t feel the chemistry between them. It seemed more a relationship of convenience because that was where the book needed to go. But I certainly couldn’t tell you where the “aha moments” were for Trisha and DJ other than it being “oh shit I like [them].”

Working with surgeons, it pains me how terrible Trisha’s family is to her with a surgeon’s schedule. You don’t get to totally predict every time how long a surgery is going to take, or when an emergent case comes in. I know that is a pain point for families in real life, but especially with her dad also being a doctor, why are they not more proud of her??? (also, having gotten through the next two books at the time of this review, her grant just falls out of relevancy, like wtf that’s a huge deal!!!)

It was also hard to get me to like DJ because his “British English” was cringe and felt very disingenuous. Every time I heard “arse” I wanted to pull my hair out.

Also… can we talk about how Trisha can’t believe DJ would ever get racially profiled because, “This is California!” Girl please. Especially when you get to Yash’s book, I can’t believe she ever said something so ignorant. I genuinely laughed out loud.

I honestly wasn’t sure I was going to move on to the next books after this one because I was pretty meh after this one. The dash of spice we got at the end though was rather enticing, I’m not gonna lie. And I want to try whatever magical food DJ is cooking in real life. 

This was so drama filled!

At first it took me a little while to get into it, but once all these plots started happening I was intrigued. The main characters were honestly kind of whatever and I didn’t love their personalities and I feel like it wasn’t explained well. Also one of the conflicts just resolved so easily in my opinion. I also didn’t feel any chemistry between the main characters. I didn’t really love most of the family dynamics and this made me laugh a little. There are some more serious themes so check trigger warnings. 

Overall: 4/5
Spice level: 1/5
Tropes: enemies to lovers, Pride and Prejudice retelling (gender-swapped)

Representation: FMC is South Asian and MMC is South Asian and African 

This story was really cute and seemed to follow the original Pride and Prejudice, while being a gender-swap. The "Elizabeth" styled character, our leading lady Trisha, was portrayed as the royalty of the 2, while DJ was snubbed by her numerous times in the story as his occupation as a chef (though clasically trained in France) seemed beneath her. It definitely had the enemies to lovers feel to it, although there was pretty much no spice, outside of the delicious-sounding dishes that he makes throughout. 

As someone who mostly needs some type of spice on the page, I feel like even classic stories that originally had no spice can be adapted to fit sexy times in. That's my fault because I almost never read reviews for a book, otherwise I would've probably known about the lack of spice. It's fine though because I enjoyed the story overall. I didn't love it, but I loved the characters. There was immense character development for both Trisha and DJ, as well as their family members. 

I did, however, sometimes feel like there was a lot going on to keep track with. Between the family drama and the budding tension between our main characters, my head spun a few times trying to keep up with things. But in the end, it all made sense and came together well.

I'm intrigued by the author's writing style, though in the future I'll make sure to check if there's any spice before reading. 

This was a good book and could easily have been a four or five star read for me, but the problematic elements knocked it down several notches unfortunately. Spoilers ahead as well as a content warning for sexual assault and ableism:

Exploring male victims of sexual assault is a very important story to bring light to and deserves proper treatment. Choosing to have a teenage girl sexually assault and drug a grown man as a plot point is not doing that. The implications and optics of a rich powerful man being taken advantage of by a teenage girl casts doubt on victims and is irresponsible story telling. Especially when there were far better ways to adapt Whickham. They could have had her embezzling his campaign funds and stealing money or even had her be an older adult who took advantage of him as a political mentor when he was just starting at his career. Every time it was mentioned I felt sick at my stomach and the story would have been so much better if anything else was done.

There were also multiple parts that seemed to be an attempt to give disabled rep that felt very ableist. The way they handled their cousin with epilepsy. Them never leaving the attic felt really gross especially with the real world history of locking disabled people away.