Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating Review

Verdict: An award-winning Irish-Bengali YA with some of the warmest Muslim family writing in the genre, undercut by an ending that lets the people who caused the harm walk away from it.

Best for: Readers who want cultural specificity, biphobia written from the inside and a closed-door teen romance, and who can accept a book that stages its conflict more convincingly than it resolves it.

Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — romance.io’s “glimpses and kisses” band, its lowest)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8/5 — a 4.06 Goodreads average across 36,303 ratings, with seven reviewers naming the same unpaid debt at the close)

Tropes: Fake dating, grumpy-sunshine, high school rivals, bisexual heroine, Muslim heroine, dual POV, coming out, found family, opposites attract, closed door.

Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating is a standalone young adult sapphic romance by Adiba Jaigirdar, published by Page Street YA in May 2021, in which a Bengali-Irish teenager whose bisexuality has just been dismissed by her white friends strikes a fake-dating bargain with the only other brown girl in her year.

It carries a 4.06 average across 36,303 Goodreads ratings, it won the YA Book Prize in 2022, and Kirkus gave it a starred review. The ratings curve is top-heavy but not adulatory — 46% of ratings are four stars rather than five, and the one-star cohort is 209 people out of 36,303. This is not a book with a loud minority report. It is a book almost everyone liked and a great many people wanted more from, and the reason is remarkably consistent. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating About?

This is young adult contemporary romance where the romance shares the page with an identity plot that is doing most of the work. The Irish setting matters: Hani and Ishu are the only two brown girls in their year, treated as interchangeable by classmates, and the book is precise about the particular texture of that — microaggressions rather than confrontations, friends rather than enemies, harm delivered by people who would be horrified to be called racist.

Hani arrives having just been told her bisexuality does not count because she has only dated boys, which is the inciting injury and also the thesis. Ishu arrives with ambition, a strained family and no interest in being liked. The book runs dual first-person POV — a structure four reviewers say does not quite differentiate the two voices — and it is the Muslim family writing, not the romance, that readers name first when asked what it gets right.

What Makes This Sapphic YA Romance Work

Bengali and Desi cultural specificity: Named by ten or more reviewers — food, language, Eid, the private family names. It is the single most-praised element and School Library Journal calls the representation outstanding.
Warm, accepting Muslim immigrant parents: Four reviewers name this as the standout, and they name it by contrast — Hani’s parents are more accepting than her white Irish friends, which inverts the shape this story usually takes.
Ishu: Five reviewers say she is the better-drawn of the two leads, and the grumpy-sunshine dynamic works because her prickliness is motivated rather than decorative.
Biphobia written from the inside: StoryGraph readers have submitted biphobia as a graphic content warning 350 times, more than any other warning on the book. The bi erasure is the plot, not the backdrop.
It reads fast: Four reviewers report finishing in one sitting, StoryGraph votes 32% fast-paced against 4% slow, and the did-not-finish rate is 1%.

Book Synopsis

Humaira Khan — Hani to everyone except her family — comes out to her two closest friends as bisexual and is told, more or less kindly, that it does not really count. She has only ever dated boys. The friendship does not break; it just quietly refuses to take her seriously, which is worse.

So she says she is dating someone. The name that comes out of her mouth is Ishita Dey, the other Bengali girl in their year, who is academically relentless, socially uninterested and the last person her friends would expect. Ishu has no reason to agree and one very good one: she needs to be head girl, and being visibly liked is part of the arithmetic.

The arrangement is transactional and specific — Hani gets a girlfriend her friends cannot dismiss, Ishu gets the social standing she cannot manufacture alone. What neither of them budgets for is how much of it stops being an arrangement, or how much pressure it puts on Hani’s friendships and Ishu’s family at exactly the same time. The question is not whether they will fall for each other. It is what the people around them will do about it.

My Review

The cultural writing here is the reason this book won a prize, and it deserves the credit. Jaigirdar writes Bengali-Irish teenage life with the confidence of someone who is not explaining it to outsiders — the food is specific, the family names are used properly, Eid happens without a glossary, and ten or more reviewers name that specificity first when asked what worked. The parents are the quiet triumph: warm, devout, and more accepting of their daughter than the secular white friends who consider themselves progressive. Four reviewers name that inversion explicitly, and it is a genuinely good piece of writing.

The second strength is Ishu, and the grumpy-sunshine pairing works because her hostility has a shape. Five reviewers say she is the more fully realised of the two, and the book is at its best when it is inside her calculations about family expectation and academic pressure rather than inside the romance.

Where it struggles is resolution, and this is the dominant complaint by a wide margin. Seven independent reviewers say the same thing: Aisling and Dee, the friends whose biphobia, casual racism and Islamophobia drive the entire plot, face no meaningful consequences. The most telling version comes from a reviewer who rated the book 4.5 stars and still named it as the flaw — when your admirers are the ones raising it, it is not a matter of taste. Six more say the ending is abrupt and drops named threads: Ishu is still closeted to her parents at the close, the head-girl plot simply stops, and there is no aftermath with the friends. And seven say the romance itself is under-developed for a book sold on a romance trope — one reviewer’s line is that it is a romance novel with hardly any romance. Underneath those sit two more: five reviewers find the antagonists flat, existing only to be cruel, and four say the two first-person voices are hard to tell apart.

The expectation to reset is the packaging. The jacket sells a funny, heart-warming rom-com in the mould of a well-known YA love-letter series. The four heaviest crowd-sourced content warnings are biphobia at 350 graphic submissions, Islamophobia at 250, toxic friendship at 248 and racism at 195, and StoryGraph’s crowd votes the book lighthearted at 73% and emotional at 62% simultaneously. Multiple readers describe it as cute and also as making them angry. If you came for the rom-com, calibrate — the friends’ cruelty is the engine. There is a smaller, stranger gap too: four reviewers point out that the blurb’s claim that Hani is one of the most popular girls in school does not survive the text, since she has two friends and speaks to almost nobody else — which makes the bargain Ishu is striking incoherent on its own terms.

My honest note: A prize-winning book about harm that is much better at showing the harm than at settling it. If you need the people who did the damage to be held to account, this ending will frustrate you; if you are here for the family, the food and the bi erasure written from the inside, it is worth every page.

Element	In Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating
Central relationship	Hani Khan & Ishita Dey — a dismissed bisexual teenager and the driven classmate she names as her girlfriend
Core tropes	Fake dating, grumpy-sunshine, high school rivals, bisexual heroine, Muslim heroine, coming out, opposites attract
Setting	Contemporary Dublin — a mostly white Irish secondary school and two Bengali households
Heat level	1/5 — romance.io’s “glimpses and kisses” band; closed door
Series	Standalone — the couple resolves, though several named threads do not
Content notes	Biphobia and bi erasure, Islamophobia, racism and microaggressions, toxic friendship and gaslighting, homophobia and lesbophobia, bullying, parental threat of disownment, one kiss without asking

How Spicy Is Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating?

One out of five, and unusually for a young adult title, romance.io does carry an entry — it bands the book “glimpses and kisses,” the lowest rung on its scale. Three further sources agree: Common Sense Media states the leads kiss a few times and go no further; StoryGraph’s 17,215 readers have logged sexual content just twice, both at the minor tier; and the publishers’ stated reading ages run from thirteen to seventeen depending on edition. This is closed door and it is not a compromise — it is what the book is.

What does need flagging in advance has nothing to do with heat. Biphobia, Islamophobia, racism and sustained toxic friendship are on the page at length and at volume, and one reviewer flags a moment where Ishu kisses Hani without asking while Hani is crying. That is one voice rather than a theme, but it is worth knowing. For a comparable at the same band, She Drives Me Crazy is also closed-door sapphic YA at a 1/5.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want Desi and Muslim teenage life written without translation, you have been waiting for bi erasure handled by someone who understands it, you read YA for the family rather than the kissing, and a closed-door romance is what you want rather than what you tolerate.

You may want to skip it if: you need the people who caused the harm to face consequences, you want the romance to be the main event rather than the third thread, flat antagonists will pull you out, or unresolved threads at the final page will feel like a broken promise.

In short: excellent on the wound, unsatisfying on the healing.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

The trade record here is genuinely strong, which is rarer than it should be for sapphic YA. Kirkus reviewed it in May 2021 and starred it, calling it an intelligent and swoony coming-of-age story. School Library Journal reviewed it, unstarred, and recommended it for all collections, praising the outstanding Desi representation. Booklist reviewed it in May 2021. No Publishers Weekly review could be located, which is notable given the author’s own site lists Kirkus and SLJ. On top of that: the YA Book Prize in 2022, a Lambda Literary Award finalist placement the same year, and a Goodreads Choice Award nomination in 2021.

And here is the gap that matters most. Kirkus starred it and School Library Journal called the way it weaves biphobia, racist microaggressions and Islamophobia into the story tactful — and neither of them mentions that the book never untangles any of it. Seven readers will not stop naming that. The professional reviews assessed how well the harm is depicted; the readers assessed what the book does about it. Both are right, and only one of those assessments tells a fifteen-year-old what they are about to feel at the last page.

BookTok activity is real and organic — 28 distinct creator handles on the title’s hashtag page, only one of which appears to belong to the author — but it is steady recommendation-list content rather than a viral moment, and TikTok exposes no usable metrics. Reddit is thinner and the thinness is itself a finding: eighteen site-wide hits, every one a listicle, roundup or recommendation request, and zero dedicated discussion threads. Nobody argues about this book. That is consistent with a 4.06 average where 46% of ratings sit at four stars. Amazon’s sales ranks, meanwhile, are effectively dormant five years on, and its single strongest category placement is Teen & Young Adult Religious Fiction — where Kirkus files it too, and where nothing about the cover would lead you.

The audiobook is dual-narrated by Reena Dutt and Shubhangi Karmakar for Listening Library, 9 hours 35 minutes, released day-and-date with print. Narration feedback is thin — two substantive comments rather than a body of opinion — but both are positive: a blog audio review praises the Irish and blended Irish-South Asian accents, the handling of the Bengali passages, and the absence of the whiny angst common in YA narration, while an Audible listener says the two voices captured both leads. Treat it as a favourable single source plus one rather than a consensus. Libro.fm ranks the audiobook #72 in YA Fiction, which is markedly healthier than its Amazon position — the audio edition is where this book is currently finding readers.

Prefer audio? Listen to Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): cultural specificity first, named by ten or more reviewers, with the food and the Bengali language cited most often. Then the accepting Muslim parents, at four, always framed as a deliberate inversion. Then Ishu herself, at five. Then the readability. The minority position worth flagging is a reversal of the pacing complaint: two reviewers found the middle slow and one took fifty-six days to reach the halfway point, while StoryGraph’s crowd votes 32% fast against only 4% slow and Amazon readers report one-sitting reads. The drag is a minority experience.

What readers argue about and complain about: Consequences, above everything. Seven reviewers say the friends whose bigotry drives the plot are never held to account, and the complaint comes as loudly from four-star reviewers as from one-star ones. Second: six say the ending is abrupt and abandons threads it named — Ishu’s coming out to her parents, the head-girl plot, any aftermath with the friends. Third, and closely related: seven say the romance is under-served in a book sold on a romance trope. Fourth: five call the antagonists flat, existing only to be cruel. Fifth: four say the two first-person voices are indistinguishable. The genuine split is whether the bigotry reads as real at all — one reviewer calls the friends’ behaviour annoyingly true to life, another says the prejudice is so outlandish it feels unnatural, and a third calls them cartoonish. That is a disagreement about whether stylised bigotry is honest, and it does not resolve.

The standalone question worth asking first: It is a standalone. Goodreads, romance.io and the author’s own page all confirm it, and no sequel has ever been announced — StoryGraph labels it book one of a series, which appears to be a database artefact rather than a plan. The couple resolves and ends the book together for real. What does not resolve is deliberate and worth knowing in advance: Ishu remains closeted to her parents at the close, and the friends face nothing. There is no cliffhanger — these are unclosed threads, not a hook. If you want more of this author, The Henna Wars is her debut and the book several reviewers here compare this one to unfavourably on exactly the consequences question.

Frequently Asked Questions

How spicy is Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating?

A 1/5 — closed door. romance.io bands it “glimpses and kisses,” Common Sense Media confirms the leads kiss and go no further, and StoryGraph’s 17,000 readers have logged sexual content only twice, at the minor tier.

Is it part of a series?

No. It is a standalone, confirmed by Goodreads, romance.io and the author’s own site, and no sequel has been announced. StoryGraph’s series label appears to be a database error.

Do the bullies get any comeuppance?

Not really, and it is the book’s biggest reader complaint. Seven independent reviewers — including several who rated it four stars or higher — say the friends whose biphobia and racism drive the plot face no meaningful consequences.

What awards did it win?

It won the YA Book Prize in 2022, was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Young Adult, and was nominated in the 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards. Kirkus also gave it a starred review.

Is the audiobook worth it?

Probably, though the evidence is thin. Reena Dutt and Shubhangi Karmakar dual-narrate the 9 hour 35 minute Listening Library edition, and the two substantive reviews found are both positive about the accents and the Bengali passages.

If You Loved Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating, Read These Next

Three with a specific overlap rather than a shared shelf. The Falling in Love Montage by Ciara Smyth is the other major sapphic YA set in Ireland, sharper and funnier, with a family thread that lands harder. She Drives Me Crazy runs the same closed-door high-school rivals-to-lovers engine at the same heat, with a premise readers argue about just as much. And She Gets the Girl gives you dual-POV teenage scheming where the two voices are genuinely distinct, which is the craft problem this book does not quite solve. More in contemporary lesbian romance and across all our book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating wants to be a warm teenage fake-dating comedy about two Bengali-Irish girls and an honest book about what casual bigotry does to a friendship, and it is far better at the second than the first. The cultural writing is excellent, the Muslim parents are the best thing in it, and Ishu is a genuinely well-built character. Against that: antagonists who face nothing, an ending that drops threads it raised, and a romance seven readers say never quite arrives. It is worth it for the family and the honesty about bi erasure — and not if you need the debt to be paid. Check Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating ranks as a prize-winning sapphic YA about belonging — culturally rich and unusually warm about family, weakened by an ending that lets everyone off, and best approached for the households rather than the fake-dating plot.