Review: Sonali Dev’s THE EMMA PROJECT.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the complimentary ARC. All opinions provided are my own.

I jumped into Sonali Dev’s The Rajes series with the final book, The Emma Project, a retelling of—you’ve prob guessed it—Jane Austen’s Emma.

Brimming with passion & vitality & with characters who feel layered, this is an interesting read that I’m still trying to pin down.

I could definitely tell that this was the final book. It has the air of things boiling up & coming to fruition over a period of time & unfortunately I do think I would have appreciated some of the pacing & structural elements more had I read earlier books.

But with that being said I found lots to appreciate about The Emma Project, newby to the series that I was.

Starting with the complex characters—even the secondary characters assert themselves & contribute to the story, whether the leads want entirely want them to or not 😉.

The family dynamics are sometimes loving, sometimes frustrating, & it’s really cool how past main characters aren’t perfect in this book just because of their once-vaunted MC status.

The Emma Project features childhood friends to lovers, 12 year age gap (she’s older), once fake-engaged to your brother, workplace romance. The sex scenes are mostly fade to black but there’s a lot of emotional intimacy here; it’s really sweet seeing how much Vansh knows Naina & vice versa—their understanding goes bone deep.

There are a lot of challenging family undercurrents in this read, including an abusive father (see my CWs) & I would have liked possibly some more time just on the development of Vansh & Naina as a couple, outside of their families. Those loom pretty large.

But this is a rich story told in a lovely, happy, & haunting voice & I would imagine a great conclusion to the series.

4 ⭐️. Release date: 05/17




[CWs: father was physically abusive to her mother & possibly to Naina as well; he’s emotionally abusive & manipulative with Naina. Naina’s mother wants her to lose weight & bemoans her lack of marriage to someone else. Vansh’s father called him stupid once in a convo with Vansh’s mother bc he’s dyslexic. In one scene, a drunk Naina has an orgasm against Vansh’s thigh & I didn’t feel totally okay about consent in that scene.]


[ID: pink shoes are in front of a wood table where the ebook rests on an open hardback copy of Emma. Next to the book is a yellow & pink orchid.]