Rating: 100% | A+ | ★★★★★
Synopsis (from Netgalley): Now that Soraya Nazari has graduated from university, she thinks it’s time to get some of the life experience she feels she’s lacking, partly due to her strict upbringing—and Magnus Evans seems like the perfect way to get it. Where she’s the somewhat timid, artistic daughter of Iranian immigrants, Magnus is the quintessential British lad. They have little in common, so there’s no way Soraya could ever fall for him. What’s the harm in having some fun as she navigates her postgrad life? And he could give her some distance from her increasingly complicated home life, where things are strained by her father’s struggles, her mother’s unhappiness and her eldest sister’s estrangement under a vague cloud of shame fifteen years earlier. Distracting herself with Magnus is easy at first. But just as Soraya realizes there’s more to Magnus than she thought, long-buried secrets, and hard questions, begin to surface—will any of her relationships survive the truth coming out? Moving between modern-day London and revolutionary Iran, The Mismatch is a gorgeously written coming-of-age story that follows a young woman as she finds love in a most unexpected place, and a path in life amid two different cultures. Spoiler-Free Review: A good book should make you sympathize with the characters. A great book should make you empathize with the characters; it should leave you so shaken at the end that you’re not quite sure whether you’re yourself or whether you’re a character. The Mismatch is a great book. Jafari writes in the vein of Sally Rooney’s Normal People—delving into the story of a young protagonist who desperately tries to carve out her own place in the world—but with her own unique woman-of-color perspective on the tried-and-true cliché millennial experience. I teared up, felt my heart hurt, and desperately whizzed through the last fifty pages wanting, wanting, wanting more. As the child of immigrants myself, I felt Soraya’s crises so very keenly—the guilt associated with her parents, the bottled-up anger, the constant need to flee. I’d never identified so much with a book, nor has a book ever so perfectly put my feelings into words. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House - Ballantine for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
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