I just wasn’t a fan of the writing style unfortunately, it felt too prescriptive for a romance and didn’t convince me of these characters.

I must firstly apologise for the amount of time it has taken me to provide a review of this book, my health was rather bad for quite some time, something that had me in hospital on numerous occasions and simply didnt leave me with the time I once had to do what I love most.

Unfortunately that does mean I have missed the archive date for many of these books, so It would feel unjust throwing any review together without being able to pay attention to each novel properly.

However, I am now back to reading as before and look forward to sharing my honest reviews as always going forward. I thank you f0r the patience and understanding throughout x

I loved this unique style of writing.
Well developed, complex characters.

I loved how New York was a powerful character in itself & i adored the jazz weaved through its pages.

It lost a 🌟 cause it took me a while to get into.

Thank you to the publisher for my eARC copy of this book. Unfortunately I didn’t love this book. I can see why others do but I just didn’t connect with this one. Not for me, sorry.

DAVID AND AMEENA...A book for all ages.
A very deep & intense read, it takes you through a journey of love & passion.
Love for our family & our partner leads to contentment...
AND
Passion leads us to follow our dreams and helps us achieve them. It teaches us to be ambitious & independent .
It helped me to look forward to life...there is still so much to be done & so much to achieve.

This books is read thanks to NetGalley, Thank you NetGalley.


The characters one day met and they bond due their share because both are immigrants descendant, they caught each other eye, and as they get to meet each other, they get to sense more attraction and more feelings for each other.

Once I started reading this book I thought this is how representation and trauma is written, the immigration topic which is imo the biggest one, don't always has to have trauma on it, something it can be a nice representation just as this book.


I want to see what Ami writes next.

Ameena is a Brit living in the USA (something I identify strongly with!!), working at a fashion magazine by day and creating art by night. David works at an ad agency, living and breathing jazz during his other hours. The bond that ties them together is they are both the descendants of immigrants, and this is such a vital part of the whole story.

Honestly, it took a while for me to get into the story. I picked it up and put it down several times, but once I was about 30% through I started to really enjoy it. The writing style is different and a lot more descriptive than many other books, but I thought it was necessary to the story. The characters were very well developed. It's so easy to paint a picture of them, hear them speak and know their story.

That ending though. I'm not sure I liked it. I feel like it just didn't vibe with the happy ever after picture that I was hoping for, or the love story that I had kind of created. For the characters and the book as a whole though, the ending was great.

I'm looking forward to Ami Rao's next story!

This book catches you from the first few pages, much like David and Ameena catch each other's attention at their first meeting on the subway..

It's a love story which unfolds initially through a spark of attraction, develops through their music and art and roller-coasters around issues of family, race and religion.

The book is so much more than the fluffiness I kind of expected it to be, and while there is absolutely room for fluff at times when reading, I'm really glad there was more to this, their characters deserved that.

Very enjoyable; it is thought-provoking with a few Oh God moments. Something different.

This is definitely a book that's hard to categorise, and if I'm completely honest I don't really know what to make of this one. I've never read anything by the author before, but I'm all about new experiences, and it sounded like an interesting read. And it was! But it's definitely a book that's hard to describe. I think for me the thing I found strange was the tone

The synopsis of the book was intriguing and so I was looking forward to reading this book and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s an intense story but beautifully written with well etched out characters that I thought about long after I finished reading the book. DAVID AND AMEENA will stay with me for a long time yet.

'David and Ameena' by Ami Rao is a book that essentially talks about immigration and art(jazz and painting). The premise seemed interesting and I was sure that I would adore it' but after finishing the book I seem to have an opposite opinion. What I liked about the book is it's authentic potrayal of the 'immigrant dilemma' and the constant search for 'where is home'. Having said that I would like to point out that the writing was putting me off constantly.The author seemed to try too hard to make it a transcending prose and it did not work. Overall not bad work for a debut author.

Y'all, I cannot express enough how much I thoroughly enjoyed the representation in this book! Showing that two people can overcome and go through this life together no matter their politics, faith, and culture. Love isn't always rainbows and fairytales, it's work and boy, do David and Ameena do the work.

While I enjoyed reading of David and Ameena, their love story and their individual backgrounds, I ultimately had a hard time getting into the writing especially near the beginning.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I am so conflicted about this book. I thought it would be a romance, and it kind of was. But it was also kind of about David and Ameena growing together and apart. It had a lot to do with their creative outlets. There were no spicy scenes. It was a very muted love story. I don't know, it was just different than what I thought it would be. I don't know that I necessarily loved it. I liked hearing more about Ameena's parents and brother than I did hearing about Ameena and David.

A beautifully written love story. Ameena is from Manchester - she’s a writer and an artist who grew up in a Muslim Pakistani family and now lives in New York. David is from Rhode Island - he’s an ad man and a jazz musician whose parents were Jewish Lithuanian immigrants. They fall in love in New York City.

This is a story about love, religion, history, family, art and music. I loved the style of writing, but there were some missing threads in the story which I’m still thinking about. Maybe it merits a re-read?

Thanks to Fairlight Books and NetGalley for the ARC.

This was such a lovely story I really, really enjoyed it. It was full of warmth, it was light and fluffy and easy to read and follow. Would recommend!

A raw interracial love story about the challenges this relationship come with. I loved the writing and seeing the glimpses of their families and background. I am not the biggest fan of romance novels but this one took me by surprise. It was just a bit long for me, but I enjoyed everything else.

I really enjoyed this book, and I especially liked the author’s next-level writing style, which almost seemed itself musical with parts of the book that were smooth and easy, rising into crescendos that pushed David and Ameena’s relationship almost to its limits.

Ameena, a Pakistani-Muslim writer by day and artist by night, left her home in Manchester for New York to avoid being forced into an arranged marriage by her very conservative and religious parents. David, an American-Jewish advertising strategist by day and jazz musician by night, is an orphan who is still mourning losing his mother. While their religious backgrounds are highlighted, both claim to not be religious. At the beginning of the book, there is an elevated meet-cute across a New York subway train car between David and Ameena, after they witness a performance they both find deeply beautiful. And while their relationship starts out passionately and grows and deepens as they support each other’s artistic pursuits, they also find themselves fiercely at odds when their religious and political differences eventually become more apparent.

I’ll start by saying that the author starts off by telling the reader that she based part of the character of David after jazz musician Aaron Goldberg, so I really enjoyed setting the mood for this book by enjoying reading it while listening to Aaron Goldberg’s music. If you enjoy jazz, check out Aaron Goldberg’s albums (and his story – I found his biography very interesting.)

Overall, this was such a complicated book, and I feel like so much could be said, but I don’t want this review to be longer than the book, so I’m going to focus this review on just a small part of it.

While we don’t know exactly how old these characters are when their relationship begins, I felt like they were in their mid-twenties, an age when anything is possible, the world can still be conquered, and while your dreams might be defined, your path is not. And they (especially Ameena) haven’t experienced quite enough to see anything but a world where everything is clearly defined by black-and-white, good-and-bad, right-and-wrong. And this is especially true of their relationship as it becomes defined.

Everyone brings baggage to a relationship, but few talk about it like Ami Rao does, and I loved how she incorporated the difficult experiences that David and Ameena both carried into this relationship. I loved how real some of their fights were. How she incorporated the ugly, almost unforgiveable, things they said to each other in heat of the moment. And then how everything was continually swept under the rug and they moved on. While perhaps not the healthiest relationship, it definitely ebbed and flowed, which felt so much more realistic than how most books handle romantic relationships.

Overall, I felt like this was a special book with a new voice, very different from anything else out there right now.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and Fairlight Books in exchange for my honest review. It has not influenced my opinion.

This one just didn't hit the mark for me. I was really intrigued with the premise. Interracial and interreligious relationships are really underrepresented in fiction and it's really important that that changes. But whilst this was at times realistically raw and flawed, I just wasn't feeling it.

Neither David nor Ameena practice their religions although both have undoubtedly shaped them. The impact on Ameena is more lasting, obviously and understandably so. And that being an issue for her didn't bother me. But holy moly projection, babe. This wasn't a balanced relationship in the slightes and no, the last chapter doesn't change my mind about that. David may have said stupid things, sure, but the man never waivered in his devotion. Ameena, in my mind, played the victim card a little too hard and unnecessarily and used it against him to justify her shockingly poor, immature behaviour. So clearly, I wasn't a fan of the love story. It wasn't particularly impactful or emotional in any way. My heart didn't soar at the high notes and it didn't feel bereft at the low notes.
It wasn't tragic, it didn't even feel particularly strong. And you can try to tell me that's real life, but the love stories of real life to make me feel something, so no, I don't think this felt like "real life".

I also really struggled with the narration style. That's a personal feeling, but it felt like I was being relayed a story rather than reading it and feeling it myself. Someone was sat in front of the couple and I was stuck in another room having to have described to me what was happening rather than seeing it for myself. Narration conceptually doesn't bother me; we need it for world building and scene setting, but this was about 99.99% someone telling me what was going on and 0.01% me actually seeing for myself what was going on.

All in all, this one just was not for me no matter how much the synopsis really pulled me in and wanted me to experience something powerful.

Unfortunately this book was so slow that I got bored of it. I finished it but I paid so little attention I do not know for sure what exactly happened. I hope to reread it again at a better point in time and have an improved review but for now this was just too slow for my liking.