The Rajes Series #4
From the publisher:
Emma gets a fresh Indian-American twist from award-winning author Sonali Dev in her heartwarmingly irresistible Jane Austen inspired rom com series.
No one can call Vansh Raje’s life anything but charmed. Handsome—Vogue has declared him California’s hottest single—and rich enough to spend all his time on missions to make the world a better place. Add to that a doting family and a contagiously sunny disposition and Vansh has made it halfway through his 20s without ever facing anything to throw him off his admittedly spectacular game.
A couple years from turning forty, Knightlina (Naina) Kohli has just gotten out of a 10-year-long fake relationship with Vansh’s brother and wants only one thing from her life…fine, two things. One, to have nothing to do with the unfairly blessed Raje family ever again. Two, to bring economic independence to millions of women in South Asia through her microfinance foundation and prove her father wrong about, well, everything.
Just when Naina’s dream is about to come to fruition, Vansh Raje shows up with his misguided Emma Project…. And suddenly she’s fighting him for funding and wondering if a friends-with-benefits arrangement that’s as toe-curlingly hot as it is fun is worth risking her life’s work for.
https://amzn.to/3QoHv6S
I am so sorry that this series has come to an end. I loved spending time with the Rajes. But on the bright side, it ends with another terrific book. If you haven’t read the earlier books, I think this one stands alone okay, but it is so much richer for having met all these characters before.
Vansh and Naina are at the heart of this book, but even Esha gets her own romance, which made me so happy. Vansh is the baby of the Raje family; in fact, they call him the Baby Prince. Naina was engaged to his eldest brother, but they broke it off when he met someone else. It turned out that they were really just using each other and had no real relationship beyond a friendship. Naina is twelve years older than Vansh, and is fiercely independent. She comes from an abusive family, and has pretty much decided on staying single forever, if only to piss off her father. She has been working for over ten years on a nonprofit devoted to getting medical care to all the women in India, especially those in rural villages. Her dream is on the verge of becoming a reality when Jiggy Mehta, a local tech genius/billionaire, offers her funding.
But then Jiggy meets Vansh and decides that Naina could share her windfall with his idea of helping the homeless in San Francisco. It’s a noble idea, of course, but Naina was counting on that money. Vansh convinces her that they should work together but spending all that time together leads to something more. Their chemistry is off the charts and Naina agrees to a friends with benefits scenario, but if you’ve ever read a romance novel, you know how that will go!
Esha is the eldest cousin of the Rajes and is mentioned in all the books, but her story comes out more fully here. The lone survivor of a plane crash that killed her parents when she was 8 years old, she has suffered from visions and seizures over the years. She has spent most of her life in the family home called the Anchorage. She hasn’t left the property in more than 30 years. One of her visions is a bird that no one else sees, until she meets Sid. He comes looking for the bird and Esha is shocked that he can see it, not to mention she doesn’t know what he’s thinking or feeling, like she does with her family. She feels better, more “normal” when she’s with Sid and decides to pursue the relationship further, but doesn’t let her family know.
All these storylines are engrossing, and I couldn’t put this book down. Lots of love and laughter, meddling family members, and some steamy love scenes all at play here. I highly recommend this series, and this book.
6/2022 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch
THE EMMA PROJECT by Sonali Dev. Avon (May 17, 2022). ISBN: 978-0063051843. 416p.
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