The Emma Project by Sonali DevMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
“Don’t you see, what you’re talking about is an Emma Project. It’s vanity. It’s looking for ways to play with people’s lives out of ennui.”
The fourth and final book in the Rajes series about a big loving, complicated family in California, stars Vansh, affectionately nicknamed Baby Prince because he is the youngest Raje and manages to use his charm and dimples to get his way and Naina, Vansh's older brother Yash's (Incense and Sensibility) ex-girlfriend. Naina was an only child and grew-up in a household where her father's coldness and rigid ways had her and her mother on edge. Childhood friends, Naina and Yash came up with an arrangement where they were in a relationship but there was nothing romantic about it. Yash got to seem settled to help his political career and Naina got her father and mother off her back about getting married. When Yash falls in love, the arrangement blows up in Naina's face when Yash's family blames her for thinking she kept him in a loveless relationship for ten years and her mother and father blame her for Yash leaving. Vansh always liked Naina and even with their twelve year age difference he remembers Naina being one of the only ones to help him with his studies when he was struggling because of his dyslexia. Vansh hates seeing her frozen out of his family's circle and the more he steps in to defend her, the more he realizes that his attraction to her is more than friends.
The more uptight she got, the goofier it made Vansh want to be. It made him want to make a complete ass of himself, if that would get her to crack a smile.
If you're a frequent reader of Dev and the Rajes series, you'll know that one of the best things about Dev's writing and stories are her family dynamics. I usually find her works to be romance adjacent, there's a strong romance plot but family contemporary fiction threads are right along beside the romance and typically bind everything together. I went into this ready to be emotionally wrung out and though there were a few times I got hit, Naina and her mother's relationship had some hurt moments (“I don’t understand you children,” her mother said about her thirty-eight-year-old daughter who had never had a chance to be a child, and had spent her entire adult life trying to change the lives of women in the remotest, most neglected parts of the world. “I know.” Those words landed on her mother like a blow and Naina kicked herself. Casual indifference was the only way to not end up saying something hurtful to her mother. Hurting her mother was like kicking a puppy.) the inclusion of one too many plots gave the story such a jumbled feel that I could never sit in the emotional spaces.
He could not lose their friendship.
You'll want to read at least the first, to get some idea on Raje family dynamics/story/history or previous book in the series as this starts off right where that one ended. Dev has all the Raje siblings and cousins with their partners meet up on a roof top right away that, to me, felt like it would have fit much better at the ending. It was a little character overwhelming but I could have rolled with it if the story then would have settled on Vansh and Naina together. Instead we get more of them separately dealing with their individual issues but forced to work together because of an awkwardly fit in sort of villainous billionaire. He has a foundation that has already agreed to give Naina money for clinics overseas but wants the attachment of fame of working with a Raje, he thought he had that because of Naina dating Yash but remember they are now broken up, and so he brings Vansh in and makes Naina work with him on his project or she'll lose the money for her clinics. Vansh gets the idea to try and solve/help with the homelessness issue in San Francisco when he comes uppn Hari, his brother Yash's campaign analytics guy and discovers he's homeless. I'm sorry but the whole Hari's homelessness and his anxiety that Vansh tries to help/cure him of because of his own issues with dyslexia and rest of his family is brilliant, along with the awkward villainous billionaire felt really plot messy. Then there was a small sub-plot of criminals trying to stop Naina's clinics from being built and, dang, I just felt myself yearning for some love and sex between Naina and Vansh.
“Don’t you see? Happiness is a lie.”
“Don’t you see? Happiness is the only truth there is.”
Naina and Vansh do spend a good amount of time together, it was just there were so many threads pulling them away from their romance plot. Around 40% Naina gets drunk and she has a little hump session on Vansh's thigh, 70% I felt like the romance was finally properly focused on and they decide, mostly Naina's doing, that they're going to sneak around and sleep together. Because of the relationship Naina grew-up seeing between her mother and father (her father was mentally and physically abusive to her mother), Naina doesn't think she is worthy of love or that it really exists. Around mid-eighty percent Vansh starts to get angry with having to hide his relationship with Naina and there's some Raje family drama with seeing Naina in a different light and Naina having a little bit of reckoning/understanding with her mummy. These separate emotional reckonings were needed by the characters but the majority of the book was dedicated to the explaining and build-up of these issues, instead of the build-up of the romance. Leaving the last 30% to deal with the romance wasn't enough for me.
He wrapped his arms around her, holding her close. “Naina.” He said her name. That was it.
Along with the other plots in the book I mentioned, there was also a little bit of secondary romance. Readers of the series will know Esha as Vansh's cousin who was the only survivor of a plane crash that killed her parents when she was a child and left her with some kind of sixth sense that gives her seizures which tell her the future. I loved this character and was looking forward to her getting her own story and was a little disappointed that her HEA was jammed into Vansh's. There felt like some paranormal-ish element from her sixth sense that didn't fit the tone of this and her romance with Sid (Yash's love India's brother) came off rushed because this wasn't their book; they also stole the epilogue which made me mad on Naina and Vansh's behalf. So, yeah, plots, threads, and structure wise, this felt like a mess to me and even though I got hints of Dev's brilliant family dynamics, I missed her emotional impacts and was disappointed in the lack of time dedicated to the romance of Naina and Vansh.
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