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The open invitation to provide your input into Heart.Wants.Books Virtual Book Club is soon to come to a close, so get those comments, emails, and DMs in so we can consider your thoughts and opinions.  We want to make the most of our reading and chatting time with you!

Readers, you know we adore Sonali Dev because we’ve read and reviewed Recipe for Persuasion and A Bollywood Affair.  For me at least, The Emma Project by Sonali Dev is no different.  As with any romance series, this delightful title allows readers to revisit characters from previous novels in the Raje series (which are all Jane Austen retellings) and it ends with a HEA. But, with a modern retelling, we also have a strong idea about how the story would progress.  All that said, I won’t cover the basic plot, but I do want to highlight that, as in the original, there is more than one couple who finds their HEA in these pages!

The Emma Project follows Vansh, the baby of the Raje family, as he comes home for a time after pursuing mission work across the globe.  I say baby, but he’s 26, and finds himself with what family friend, and his older brother’s ex, 38 year old Naina, calls “an Emma Project.”  Naina has been pursuing some pretty focused mission work and the two end up thrown together professionally.  I won’t spoil more of the fun, but it’s a very fun hang.  Both have some pretty significant family of origin issues which they are very conscious of, and both still have a lot to learn about themselves, and especially each other.  Personally, I really appreciated the scrappy nature of nonprofit work being featured, even if I don’t understand the intricacies of the international pieces.  From Naina’s awful office her funder pushed on her, which was so eloquently described I could have been sitting there, to the power dynamics that have to be navigated to get the work done, it was so familiar, and quite accurate to the experiences of many in the sector, unfortunately.  

My favorite part of The Emma Project was the well-rounded cast of characters.  Those from the previous novels (even though I’ve only read the first, second, and now fourth), and new characters are so dimensional, and I really appreciated more time with the aunties and learning new details about cousin Esha’s story, which has been building since book one.  I’m giving this title a solid 4 stars, which as a reminder equates to loving it, highly recommend, not likely for top 5 titles of the year (out of an anticipated 100-140 total), so not 5 stars, but still high praise!  

Now, I do feel like I need to warn readers a bit.  While reading this title, I listened to the Failure To Adapt podcast discuss Jane Austen’s Emma and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless thanks to a friend of the blog.  They had a discussion about the “hot Janes” in Austen novels, and the lack of a Jane Fairfax like character in Clueless.  Following that listen (which is NSFW and hilarious), I was looking for which characters in the retelling aligned with which characters in the classic, as most of the names did not reveal that information.  I could argue Jane’s presence either way, but I noticed no Eltons, thankfully.  If I’m on team Jane, then Frank Churchill’s character is brilliant.  Also, Mr. Martin’s character is quite different from the classic, but fits his Harriet with perfection, although our Emma does not try to set her up.  To tie it all together, my absolute favorite part of this novel is how the characters observe each other, including all the pieces they pick up on and the ones they don’t, because that is what makes for an amazing, and real, relationship in real life.  What is done and said is important, but for those of us who are still healing from brokenness, having friends and loved ones (romantic and otherwise) who see what we can’t yet verbalize and pick up on all the differences we show in non-verbal ways is so magical and fantastic because that helps us to feel seen and valued, and it makes all the difference.

What do you need in a retelling, modern or otherwise, to make it rise above the rest?

~Nikki  

Readers, I love to admit that part of what I love about Jane in January is that we don’t have to explain the plot of each re-telling title and can get right to the business of what we thought about it. Additionally, I don’t have give you a whole overview of author Sonali Dev’s work because I already did it last January when we reviewed Recipe for Persuasion. Does that seem a little lazy? No, I’m working smarter not harder here people! And, I do feel justified in thinking that my reading life takes up the time of a part-time job. I’m not sad about it, just stating the #facts. Additionally, ANOTHER BIG ENNEAGRAM ONE PLOT TWIST, I STILL have not read books 1 and 3 in The Rajes series! Is it probable that we’ll read book three in a future Sense & Sensibility Jane in January?…oh you should expect no less. I’m beyond surprised at still not having read Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, but, there we are. Surprisingly, Amazon’s First Reads for December 2022 included the newest Sonali Dev title, The Vibrant Years. If you didn’t purchase it for free with your Prime account last month like Nikki and I did, it is currently available through KindleUnlimited. Plus, there seems to be another title coming from Dev in September 2023, because Amazon is a TEASE.

What do we love?! Retellings! Why do we love them?! Because they bring a ‘tale as old as time’ into a modern era. And ya’gurl finds the rhythm of the originals tedious and problematic (most of the time, and specifically in the case of Emma). Do you know why else I loved The Emma Project? Because we have a gender swap of the main characters. Emma’s character is represented by Mr. Vansh Raje and our Mr. Knightly is represented by the older and more, dare I say, EnneagramOne-ish, Ms. Naina Kohli born Knightlina Kohli. I think having the older character be female, really brings the 12 years difference in age between Knightly and Emma to be seen as more ‘problematic’ for the opposite sex, when it can be JUST AS PROBLEMATIC for the more ‘typical’ situation where the woman is younger than the man. The age-gap is a discussion topic near the end of the book where the families start giving their opinions on their relationship, and Naina doesn’t stand for that patriarchal bullshit. 

I am also giving The Emma Project four solid stars. Highly recommend, and there’s also the bonus of delicious sexy-times. You know by now that such antics alone are worthy of a 3 star review…most of the time. And, obviously, we’re working our way through Dev’s backlist and here for anything she writes in the future.

~Ashley

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