Welcome to Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating!

 

I’m not really one for making New Year’s resolutions, because I just don’t care, personally. But one thing I told myself that I wanted to start doing was reading more female-led queer books. Because, if I’m being honest, most of my bookshelf is male-led queer books. That’s simply down to the fact that I really only got the confidence to even read all these queer books a few years ago, and I figure, as a queer man myself, I’ll go with the male-led ones, as I’ll be more likely to see myself in them. But I’ve realised that I’m really limiting myself and, honestly, likely missing out on a shedload of amazing books by not reading female-led ones. So, this is a long-winded introduction to basically say I want to read more female-led queer books. The first of which is Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar.

Immediately I want to include that this book comes with a content warning. The book itself mentions that it contains instances of racism, homophobia (specifically biphobia and lesbophobia), Islamaphobia, toxic friendships, gaslighting and parental abandonment. So, I just wanted to mention that in case these are things you want to actively avoid.

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Anyway, our Kraft Blurbaroni and Cheese tells us that easy going and popular Hani Khan has it all, until she comes out as bisexual and her friends don’t believe her. Then academic overachiever Ishu Dey has a lot to prove. But her shot at head girl relies on being popular. So, the girlies’ solution is to pretend to date, even though they hardly know each other. But as they get closer, things get messy. So, we’ve immediately got the fake dating trope. Big fan of it personally – one of my favourite shows to casually watch revolves around it, actually. And the fact that Hani and Ishu barely know each other? Even better, even messier.

Our first chapter opens on Miss Overachiever, Ishu, studying, when she gets a call. And it’s set up that she doesn’t really get people contacting her and that her phone is old. But her sister, Nikhita, is calling to say that she’s coming home to surprise their parents, but Ishu tells us that you don’t really surprise Bengali parents, unless you want the consequences. But Nikhita ends the call by saying she has news, and that it’ll get shared when she gets there. The rest of the chapter is how she has this surprise test in school, and this girl, Aisling, pretty much glares at her, so we get the idea she doesn’t like her.

Then we switch to Hani in chapter two, where she’s with her friends, Aisling and Deidre (Dee), and they’re listening to Hani’s Abba’s speech, as he has a political campaign going on as he is running for a county council position. Then as she and her friends leave the mosque they were at, Hani laments that she couldn’t have stayed longer, and that she sort of would have liked to have stayed for the Maghrib prayer, and that Aisling and Dee wouldn’t know what a Maghrib prayer was, or when it would even take place. And I’ll fully admit, as a white person who doesn’t actively practice any religion, I didn’t know what the Maghrib prayer was.

And this was one of the things I really liked about this book. There were little bits in the book mentioned, like the Maghrib prayer, that I didn’t know what they were, as they aren’t a part of a culture, or religion, that I am a part of, so I got to learn about them by doing the quickest little Google searches. Like, I learned that, according to Google, “[A]s an Islamic day starts at sunset, the Maghrib prayer is technically the first prayer of the day. If counted from midnight, it is the fourth prayer of the day.” It’s the case of things like these, parts of Hani and Ishu’s lives respectively, are sprinkled throughout the book. I list this as a positive as I have read another book that aimed to do a similar thing, in teaching readers about the culture and religion, but it wasn’t implemented as seamlessly as it was in this book. In the other book I read, it came off more as taking a break from the story and plot to tell the reader about this thing, as opposed to it just being part of the characters’ lives and just part of the book.

But to get back to chapter two, we close out the chapter by seeing that Hani is very much thinking that before Ishu came to her school, she could be whoever she wanted, but once Ishu arrived, being the only other Bengali girl, it was the case of her (Hani’s) friends asking pretty much why she was doing everything she did – I think it was because they were basically expecting Hani and Ishu to be the same people. And that was because of what? Racism.

By the time Hani comes out as bisexual, it’s on page 34, and after her friends have just tried to set her up with this guy, to paraphrase what they say to her: “How can you know you’re bisexual if you’ve never even kissed a girl.” And my god… Things like that frustrate me so much. Like, Hani’s friends are Straight, so it’s one of those things that just doesn’t make sense to them. Is it true that some people figure out their sexuality by experimenting? Yes. But it’s also true that people figure their sexuality out without needing to. It’s the case of everyone figures out their own sexuality in their own way. Some people just know.

I can’t lie, the short chapters did kind of mess with how I write these posts. There are 51 chapters – that are mostly quite short – and usually I write about the first three before going general, but it’s been a little harder with this book. But, without trying to spoil anything, I think both of the girls’ personalities really started to come out around page 60 or so. This was the point when they really started talking to each other. Like, we get bits from each of them before this and you do get sort of what they’re both like, but it was almost like they really started coming into who they were once they were put in this uncomfortable situation with someone who was almost a stranger.

But the gals do start fake dating, and the guide in the title is basically a Google Doc they’ve set up for themselves. It’s got information about their lies on it, rules they’ve set up, boundaries and what their fake break-up was going to be. It’s things like that. Hani is doing it to get her friends, which don’t honestly seem like all that great people to me, to believe that she’s bisexual. Ishu is doing it so she can basically better her own reputation after her parents believe that her sister is throwing her life away.

To go back to Hani’s friends, Aisling and Deidre, for a moment. Sometimes they’d say things… just stupid and offensive things, and when I read them, I just couldn’t help but just cringe, because those two… You know, actually, I had a point I was going to make, but I think it would spoil a bit too much if I made it. So, I’ll leave that point by saying they made me cringe.

But to go back to Hani and Ishu. After the gals’ first “date”, there’s a moment where Ishu mentions that she’s kind of surprised that their plan is working… and I’ll say, it’s the fake dating trope, so what I assumed would happen would be that their plan would end up working, they’d both get what they wanted out of their fake relationship and then when it came to their fake break up, one of them likely wouldn’t want to end it because she had caught feelings. Or that perhaps they would fake break up, but then they might start feeling like something was missing from their lives, and then they would realise that they had feelings for one another.

For the ending of this book, I feel like it came around faster than I expected it to. I’d say, the events of this book are pretty much a snowball, but then that snowball gets pushed over the edge of a cliff. Like, things build up until they have that fall over the edge where they explode. And the book did come out in May 2021, so it’s been a good seven, eight months at this point, so I’m not going to explicitly spoil the ending, but I’m going to leave my thoughts on the ending by saying that I’m happy that Ishu managed to bring out of Hani what she did. I realise that’s saying next to nothing, but again, I don’t want to say too much and risk spoiling the end.

But to circle back to what I mentioned right at the start of this, about how I wanted to read more female-led queer books, I think I made a really good choice for my one to start with. I really enjoyed this – although it did take me a hot moment to realise that it was set in Ireland, but that was my bad. I’ve read three books so far in 2022, but this is easily my favourite of the three. That’s no shade to the other two, by any means, and it might have been because the was set in Ireland – so closer to home than the other two. I don’t know, this book just had a vibe to it that resonated with me that the others, set in the US, didn’t have.

Okay, bye!