I really enjoyed Love & Resistance by Kara H.L. Chen but this one takes the cake. If you love stories about wondering if we have been carrying our family’s dreams, this is for you. It’s tender and swoony all at once. Keep reading this book review of Asking for a Friend for my full thoughts.
Summary
Juliana Zhao is absolutely certain of a few things:
1. She is the world’s foremost expert on love.
2. She is going to win the nationally renowned Asian Americans in Business Competition.
When Juliana is unceremoniously dropped by her partner and she’s forced to pair with her nonconformist and annoying frenemy, Garrett Tsai, everything seems less clear. Their joint dating advice column must be good enough to win and secure bragging rights within her small Taiwanese American community, where her family’s reputation has been in the pits since her older sister was disowned a few years prior. Juliana always thought prestige mattered above all else. But as she argues with Garrett over how to best solve everyone else’s love problems and faces failure for the first time, she starts to see fractures in this privileged, sheltered worldview. With the competition heating up, Juliana must reckon with the sacrifices she’s made to be a perfect daughter—and whether winning is something she even wants anymore.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Asking for a Friend begins with grief. With mourning someone, but also the not knowing if the person we know, the person we love, is the person they were. In the same story, we love a good frenemy and a business competition. What I loved in Asking for a Friend is the way it takes this business competition and uses it to chat about family dreams, our own ambition, and love all at once. She wants so badly to win to honor her dad’s memory, to feel connected to him, but what happens if it turns out that’s all it is. That we don’t want it any more.
Asking for a Friend has so many elements we love. We love romance advice columns, frenemies, and family secrets. We also adore a romance skeptic and a hopeless romantic. But what I really love about both of them is that they have different reasons for their beliefs in love. For one it’s a belief in love because there has to be something to make it worth it. And for the other, they are skeptical of love because it hasn’t worked in the past. The different ways divorce and love which crumbles, impacts people.
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We also love a girl who doesn’t like confrontation. In many ways, Asking for a Friend felt a bit too close to home. It’s for the message to take a break, to open up our lives. And where Asking for a Friend really took off is the way Juliana had to manage her mom’s expectations and family’s dreams. To figure out what she wants to stand up for even when it’s hard. All the ways we have to navigate love which is conditional, love which has strings, and love which takes time.
Find Asking for a Friend on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.