This post contains affiliate links, including Amazon and Libro.fm. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.
Verdict: A warm, sharply specific sapphic YA about coming out in a Bangladeshi Muslim family in Dublin, with a family story that lands hard, undercut by a romance that asks too little of the girl who wronged the heroine.
Best for: Readers who want a closed-door coming-of-age story where culture, sisters and parents matter as much as the crush, and who can forgive a narrator for being exactly as self-absorbed as a real teenager.
Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — glimpses and kisses)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.91 Goodreads average across nearly 32,000 ratings, with a romance that readers keep saying was mis-sold)
Tropes: Rivals-to-lovers, coming out, school competition, first love, childhood friends reunited, sisterhood, family acceptance, cultural clash, bisexual love interest, first-person POV.
The Henna Wars is Adiba Jaigirdar’s 2020 debut, a standalone sapphic young adult novel from Page Street YA set in present-day Dublin, where Nishat Ahsan comes out to her Bangladeshi Muslim parents, enters her school’s business competition with a henna stall, and discovers that the girl she has just fallen for, Flávia, has decided to sell henna too.
It sits at a 3.91 average across 31,788 Goodreads ratings, drew starred reviews from Kirkus and Shelf Awareness, and was a Goodreads Choice nominee for Young Adult Fiction in 2020. The praise is broad and the low-star reviews are few, but they all point at the same thing, and it is the thing the cover sells. That gap is worth understanding before you start.
What Is The Henna Wars About?
The Henna Wars is contemporary YA first and a contemporary lesbian romance second. Amazon files it under teen romantic comedy, LGBTQ+ romance and, tellingly, teen religious fiction, with a reading age of 14 to 17. That shelf placement is honest. This is a book about identity, faith and family with a love story running through it, and a school setting with the social machinery that implies: cliques, a teacher-run competition, rumours that travel faster than facts.
Nishat is the whole engine. She is proud of her culture, certain of her own rightness, and newly out to parents who respond by acting as though she never spoke. What she lacks is perspective. Flávia, Black Brazilian-Irish and bisexual, arrives assuming that henna is simply pretty art anyone can pick up and sell. The book is told entirely in Nishat’s first-person voice, which buys it an intense, funny, sometimes exhausting interiority, and costs it any real access to Flávia.
What Makes This Sapphic YA Coming-of-Age Romance Work
- Nishat’s voice: Readers who love the book start with her. A Bengali Muslim lesbian narrator who refuses to treat those identities as a contradiction is representation readers describe as rare, and they value it accordingly.
- Priti: Nishat’s younger sister is the most consistently praised character in the reviews. Fierce, loyal and funny, she balances the heavier material, and at least one reader wants her to get her own book.
- The parents’ arc: Their rejection hurts, and the slow, partial movement toward acceptance is where the book earns its emotional credit. Readers describe it as heartbreaking and, by the end, genuinely touching.
- Culture on the page: Food, family weddings and henna itself are written with evident love, and the cultural appropriation argument gives the rivals-to-lovers setup an actual subject rather than a manufactured feud.
- Low barrier to entry: StoryGraph readers tag it emotional, hopeful and lighthearted, pace it medium-to-fast, and almost nobody abandons it.
Book Synopsis
Nishat Ahsan has decided she is done hiding. She tells her parents she is a lesbian, and the conversation goes about as badly as a conversation can go without anyone shouting: they simply refuse to hear it. At home, the silence settles in. At her Dublin school, where she is one of very few brown students, things are not much easier, especially with Chyna, a girl who has spent years spreading racist rumours about her.
Then two things happen at once. A school business competition gives Nishat something to pour herself into, and she knows exactly what she wants to sell: henna, the art she grew up with at family celebrations and the one thing she is sure she does better than anyone around her. And Flávia walks back into her life, a childhood friend grown into someone beautiful, charismatic and very hard to stop thinking about. Nishat’s crush is immediate and total.
The problem is that Flávia has entered the competition with a henna business of her own, copied from a culture that is not hers, and she happens to be Chyna’s cousin. What was a crush becomes a contest, and the contest starts to cost Nishat her friends, her focus and her patience with everyone around her. Meanwhile the girl she is competing against keeps looking at her as though the feelings might go both ways. With her family still refusing to acknowledge who she is, Nishat has to decide what she is willing to lose to win, and whether Flávia is someone she can trust at all.
My Review
The best thing about The Henna Wars is how specific it is. A Bangladeshi Muslim lesbian in an Irish school, a Black Brazilian bisexual love interest, a family that left Bangladesh because of its own love marriage and now wants its daughters on a safer path: that is not a combination YA had produced much of in 2020, and Jaigirdar writes it from the inside. Nishat’s line that being Muslim and being gay are not mutually exclusive is the sentence readers quote back most often, and the book does the work of making it true on the page rather than just declaring it.
The family material is the second real strength, and it is stronger than the romance. The Ahsan household is not written as villains. The parents’ fear comes from somewhere, their daughters’ bond is the warmest thing in the book, and the movement between them is slow enough to feel earned. The craft reason it works is restraint: nobody gives a speech that fixes everything. StoryGraph readers put strong character development at 80%, and this is where they found it.
Where it struggles is the love story, and this is not my personal gripe. It is the most repeated complaint in the low-star reviews. Flávia takes Nishat’s culture, sells it, and sits beside the cousin who has bullied Nishat for years, and the book resolves all of that faster and more gently than the damage warrants. Readers who were fully invested in Nishat’s hurt say they could not follow her to forgiveness. Around that sit the structural problems: a lot of threads, from outing to vandalism to the friendship fallout, that several reviewers call rushed or glossed over; school consequences that land early and vanish at the climax; two best friends who blur into one. A smaller group finds Nishat self-centred, though others argue that her impulsive, self-righteous streak is just accurate teenage writing. At 2%, the StoryGraph did-not-finish rate is low, a fraction of the 9% I flagged on a longer title here recently. People finish it. They just argue about the ending.
One expectation to reset: the marketing, including a BuzzFeed pull-quote on the Amazon listing, sells this as lesbian enemies-to-lovers. Readers repeatedly say it is not. Nishat has a crush from the start, Flávia never hates her, and the rivalry is a business competition rather than hostility. If enemies-to-lovers is what drew you, calibrate; if a gentle, crush-first rivals story is what you wanted, relax.
My honest note: A family novel with real heart and a romance that gets waved through. If you need the love interest to earn it, this will frustrate you. If Nishat, Priti and the parents are enough, the book is well worth the time.
| Element | In The Henna Wars |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Nishat Ahsan & Flávia Santos — Bangladeshi Muslim lesbian and Black Brazilian bisexual schoolgirl, rivals-to-lovers |
| Core tropes | Rivals-to-lovers, school competition, coming out, first love, childhood friends reunited, sisterhood |
| Setting | A Dublin secondary school and the Ahsan family home, present day |
| Heat level | 1/5 — glimpses and kisses |
| Series | Standalone — hopeful, happy-for-now ending |
| Content notes | Forced public outing, homophobia, parental rejection, racism and racist bullying, cultural appropriation, Islamophobia |
How Spicy Is The Henna Wars?
A 1/5. romance.io does index it, which is not a given for YA, and rates the steam level “glimpses and kisses”, its lowest band, across 61 ratings there. Amazon lists a reading age of 14 to 17, and no reader review I found describes anything past kissing. The romance is a crush, a few charged moments and a first relationship, and readers treat it as one strand of the book rather than the point of it.
The element worth flagging is not heat at all. It is the outing: StoryGraph’s author-approved content warnings list it as graphic, and it happens late, when you are most invested. No reviewer flags anything else as sexual content. If you want this same closed-door register elsewhere, She Gets the Girl and You Should See Me in a Crown sit in the same 1/5 band.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you want South Asian Muslim lesbian representation written from the inside, you read YA for family and sibling bonds as much as for the crush, you like a closed-door first love, and a heroine who is often wrong does not put you off.
You may want to skip it if: you need the love interest to earn forgiveness on the page, you were promised enemies-to-lovers and want real hostility, you want every bully and outing to carry consequences, or a young, dramatic narrative voice grates on you.
In short: a rich, specific coming-of-age story that is stronger as a family novel than as a romance.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)
Six years on, this is a steady backlist book rather than a live conversation. There is no viral moment, and I could not find organic BookTok traction; the one relevant result was a DIVA Magazine list in April 2026 of sapphic romances you will not find on BookTok, which included it. Reddit could not be checked from here, so I am not claiming anything about its footprint there. What it has is quantity and reach: 31,788 Goodreads ratings, a 3.93 StoryGraph average across more than 15,000 reviews, translated editions, and trade coverage most indie sapphic books never get. Kirkus starred it and called it impossible to put down, and Shelf Awareness, Booklist and School Library Journal all praised it. The audiobook came out alongside the print edition in May 2020 from Penguin Random House’s Listening Library, narrated by Priya Ayyar and running 8 hours 16 minutes. I found no listener commentary on the narration specifically.
Prefer audio? Listen to The Henna Wars on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): Nishat first, and the representation she carries. “Authentic” is the word that recurs, from readers and from Shelf Awareness alike, and reviewers call the combination of identities rare in YA. Then Priti, who comes up in nearly every positive review. Then the parents, whose arc readers call heartbreaking early and touching by the end. The wedding scenes and the love for Bengali culture get named repeatedly, and the cultural appropriation argument is praised for taking on something YA rarely touches. A few reviewers specifically defend Nishat’s flaws, arguing that her impulsiveness is what makes her a believable teenager.
What readers argue about and complain about: The romance, above everything. Several low-star reviewers say outright that the rivals-to-lovers label is misleading, because Nishat has a crush from the first meeting and Flávia never hates her. The second theme is forgiveness: Flávia copies Nishat’s designs and profits from them, and readers who were invested in Nishat’s hurt found the apology too thin for the damage. Third: too much, too fast. Coming out, a forced outing, racist bullying, vandalism and a friendship rupture all share one book, and reviewers say the appropriation debate and the school’s response get glossed rather than resolved. Kirkus, notably, praised the ending as giving every character what she deserves, which is precisely the point on which readers most disagree. Beyond that: Nishat’s friends feel interchangeable, and one strongly negative reviewer found the voice juvenile. Opinions split on Nishat herself, a brat to some readers and an honest teenager to others.
The standalone question worth asking first: it is complete. There is no sequel and nothing to wait for; the ending is hopeful and happy-for-now rather than a wedding, which is normal for YA. If you want more Jaigirdar, her most-read book is Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating, which sits higher at 4.06 across more than 36,000 ratings. Her later titles land lower: The Dos and Donuts of Love at 3.82, Rani Choudhury Must Die at 3.56, and A Million to One at 3.41.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Henna Wars enemies-to-lovers?
Not really. It is marketed that way, but Nishat has a crush on Flávia from the start and Flávia never hates her. It is closer to a gentle rivals-to-lovers story built around a school business competition.
How spicy is The Henna Wars?
A 1/5. romance.io rates it “glimpses and kisses”, its lowest band, and Amazon lists a reading age of 14 to 17. There is kissing and nothing more explicit.
Is The Henna Wars a standalone?
Yes. It is a complete story with no sequel, and it ends on a hopeful, happy-for-now note for Nishat and Flávia. Adiba Jaigirdar’s other books are separate stories.
Does The Henna Wars have trigger warnings?
Yes. StoryGraph’s author-approved warnings list a graphic outing, plus homophobia, bullying, racism and cultural appropriation, with minor Islamophobia. Nishat’s parents also reject her coming out early in the book.
Is there an audiobook of The Henna Wars?
Yes. It is narrated by Priya Ayyar for Penguin Random House’s Listening Library, runs 8 hours 16 minutes, and was released in May 2020 alongside the print edition.
If You Loved The Henna Wars, Read These Next
The obvious next step is Jaigirdar’s own Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating, which keeps the Dublin setting and the Bengali heroines and swaps the rivalry for fake dating, with a stronger romance. If the school competition was the draw, You Should See Me in a Crown runs a closed-door sapphic romance through a prom-queen race with the same fight for belonging. And for another Irish sapphic YA with a lighter touch, The Falling in Love Montage trades the family drama for a summer romance.
For more in this register, browse our lesbian YA books guide, the enemies-to-lovers reading list, or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
The Henna Wars is a book that wants to hold a great deal at once, and mostly does. Nishat’s voice is specific and alive, the relationship with Priti is the warmest thing in it, and the parents’ slow turn gives it real emotional weight. It is also mis-sold as enemies-to-lovers, too quick to forgive the girl who wronged its heroine, and crowded enough that the outing and the bullying never get the consequences they seem to promise. Whether that trade works depends on what you came for, but the reader who wants a family story with a first love inside it gets a complete, hopeful book. Check The Henna Wars on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, The Henna Wars ranks as a landmark-representation sapphic YA coming-of-age novel — warm, specific and genuinely moving about family, held back by an under-earned romance, and best approached for Nishat, Priti and the parents rather than the rivalry.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 3.7/5
- ✓ 3.91 average across 31,788 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ Kirkus and Shelf Awareness starred reviews
- ✓ Only 2% did-not-finish on StoryGraph
- ✓ Romance mis-sold as enemies-to-lovers
Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5
- ✓ Sweet, low-key first love
- ✓ Competition gives the crush friction
- ✓ Bisexual love interest with her own family
- ✓ Forgiveness comes too easily for many
Characters ★★★★☆ 4.1/5
- ✓ Nishat’s voice drives the whole book
- ✓ Priti is the most-praised character
- ✓ 80% of StoryGraph readers cite strong development
- ✓ Best friends blur together
Writing ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Fast, readable first-person voice
- ✓ Culture written with evident love
- ✓ Kirkus calls it impossible to put down
- ✓ Some find the voice juvenile
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ Parents’ rejection genuinely hurts
- ✓ Sister bond balances the heavy material
- ✓ Emotional is the top StoryGraph mood at 72%
- ✓ Too many threads dilute the weight
Heat Level ★☆☆☆☆ 1/5
- ✓ Glimpses and kisses on romance.io
- ✓ Reading age 14 to 17
- ✓ Kissing only, closed door
- ✓ The outing is the scene to flag
Ending ★★★☆☆ 3.5/5
- ✓ Complete standalone, no cliffhanger
- ✓ Hopeful happy-for-now for both leads
- ✓ Family arc lands warmly
- ✓ Bullies and outing face few consequences
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Priti and the family reward a return
- ✓ 8-hour audiobook is an easy second pass
- ✓ Hani and Ishu extends the world
- ✓ Romance frustration discourages revisiting
Affiliate disclosure: Lesbian Romance Reads participates in the Amazon Associates Program and the Libro.fm affiliate program. If you buy through a link on this page we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you.