I enjoyed this novel more than I expected! I found the story original and interesting, with a bit of humor and drama thrown in.
Asha, a brilliant computer programmer, has her life upended when she is reunited with Cyrus, her high school crush. She quickly abandons her Ph.D. studies, marries Cyrus, and together, with his friend Jules, they begin a tech startup, hence the name of the book. Their startup app is aimed at non-religious believers who want to experience unique rituals that are based on their interests and preferences. Asha codes the program, Cyrus brings charisma and Jules holds everything together. The app, We Are Infinite (WAI) becomes an instant hit and we get to see how the effects of success change the group dynamics.
I really enjoyed Anam's characters and storytelling and I'll definitely read her other novels.

“Ritual, community, that’s what religion offers that no other human construct has been able to replace. Until now. We are here to give meaning back to people, to restore and amplify faith—not in a higher power but in humanity.”
― Tahmima Anam, The Startup Wife

I loved the premise but it fell a bit flat for me. I do know others might enjoy it more. Maybe this kind of book just isn’t for me.

(I know, I’m late again!)

3.75 stars, I think?

This one wasn’t quite what I was expecting. For the most part, I enjoyed the story, but the protagonist was a bit infuriating at times (although I do get some of that after listening to part of an interview with the writer). I was glad when the protagonist finally stood up for herself and alluded to the end of her relationship, but wow. I couldn’t believe how, even towards the very end, she still managed to blame herself for a lot of her partner’s abusive and manipulative behaviour and full-on gaslighting…but again, maybe some of it’s understandable, in an enraging sort of way. Anyway. What an experience. You should definitely read this book.

The concept of this book in the synopsis was super intriguing and modern which is what drew me to read it. There were parts of it that I really liked, and parts that didn't really work for me. I didn't feel that it was a very gripping novel that I wanted to read in one sitting nor would it be one I'd read again. But, it is different from other books that are currently out there, a super original storyline written by a female author of colour about a women of colour in tech so I would recommend that people read it even if it wasn't one I really loved.

I liked the character of Asha a lot in that she was intelligent, motivated, and a risk-taker. A woman of colour working in tech with big ideas and big dreams but also willing to take risks, she grew on me especially towards the end of the novel when she develops more confidence in herself. Cyrus seemed a little unreal to me. It was hard to picture him as a person, he just seemed so unrealistically calm and nonchalant about everything that he didn't seem real. Despite this, I think the progression of their marriage while they worked together was natural and seemed inevitable given their situation. I think it was a subtle but good satirical commentary on being a businesswoman in today's society where most big businesses are led by men or, men are put as the face of the company in order for them to be taken seriously.

As a technical criticism, I did not like the author's usage of "tribe" multiple times in the novel to describe Asha's close group of friends. It's been spoken about before in social justice and Indigenous rights spaces that using the word "tribe" in a trivial way marginalizes Indigenous nations, and the concept of "tribes" is rooted in colonialism.

2.5/ 5 stars

This book is general fiction with a bit of science fiction.

It is set in the near future (or maybe an alternate reality?). Best friends Asha, Jules and Cyrus build a social media app that replaces religious rituals.

The narrator is Asha, a brilliant female coder (1st person POV).

The three decide to work at the exclusive tech incubator called Utopia.

The premise of this book is super unique. The book has things that we recognize like social media. But adds all kinds of inventions that do not exist here.

There were parts of this book that I found very intriguing. I liked the heroine. I liked the idea of the app that they were working on. But I didn't love the backstory at the beginning. And the last chapter was really different from the rest of the book. Overall the book was just okay for me.

Anam has anything a girl could ask for, but she’s hungry for more. She wants to change her life up completely, quit school and move to New York to work at Utopia, a massive tech startup nursery. But her husband isn’t so sure about it. This sets up one of the biggest changes to their lives, as you might guess. An interesting story about choosing between work and life, it was a nice break from the paranormal stuff I usually read, even though it did have some aspects of that in the end half of the book.

After creating software for the new social media that’s going to take over the world, Anam can’t believe the thing that’s going to make everyone rich is something that she created with her own two hands, with her husband as the CEO and his best friend also working with them. They want to bring faith back to the people, but instead of through a higher power, an artificial intelligence in a social media platform that generates your perfect theme for anything in your life, based on your life as a whole and your experiences, and your own personal taste about things.

This book is more just daily life and memories of other times when they were younger. It’s really chill, just people being people living their lives. The characters are like anyone you could know in real life, and even when things get really stressful I know that they’ll be able to figure out what’s best. I enjoyed it, but it’s not my new favourite. It is what it is, and you should check it out if you want a chill book to break up all your other usual genres.

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Would you drop out of your PhD program to create an app and start a business with your high school crush that you recently reunited with and married?

Well that’s exactly what Asha Ray did in The Startup Wife. With her husband Cyrus, Asha (a coder) creates this highly successful platform that replaces replaces religious rituals. But how will their app effect their relationship?

I love how this novel tackled a really interesting topic of love on so many levels. First is the partners in business and life trope. We often hear about super successful couples (the Gates, Bezos) splitting up after working together and I felt this was a more modern take of the behind the scenes of it all. Due to the nature of the app that they created, it does touch on death and religion quite a bit so if those are triggering topics for you then I would not recommend. It really does cause you to think about love after one passes away and how that affects our lives. Other forms of love include self love as we see how Asha deals with her husbands and company’s instant fame. This book was an easy read and not traditional in any way. Sometimes I felt like it was going no where but I still enjoyed the book very much!

3.5/5

The Startup Wife is an interesting book that touches on many different important topics, but mainly what it means to be a woman of color behind the brains of a Tech Startup. The protagonist and narrator, Asha Ray is brilliant, likable, strong, and full of wit and determination.

We follow Asha as she goes from dedicated Ph.D. Student at MIT to falling in love and getting married to her high school crush, Cyrus Jones, and ultimately, starting a company with Cyrus and their best friend Jules.
The trials and tribulations that follow the group of three as they take a great idea and launch it into a life-altering social media platform are a tad lackluster, until the end - making this book a very slow burn. The storyline itself is incredibly relevant and filled with many cultural references that Millennials will find comforting and relatable. My favorite bits of the novel lies within Asha, Jules, the New York Setting, and the references to modern society that anyone who has worked in any sort of a tech-related environment will grasp. The writing was well done, the character development was lacking in some areas but overall the book is entertaining and a worthwhile read.

I am a big fan of Tahmima Anam, I loved The Golden Age, her book about partition. This book, while having a very different and very contemporary plot was equally engaging and equally well written. The whole premise of an app that replaces religious rituals is so unique and fascinating and the main character of Asha is fully realised and her struggle with power in her marriage is so timely.

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.
Expected publication date: July 13, 2021
When Asha Ray meets cerebral, philosophical dreamer, Cyrus Jones, there is an instant connection. Soon, Asha is abandoning her PhD fellowship and working with Cyrus to develop a new social media platform unlike any other. When the two are rocketed into multi-million-dollar success with Cyrus as the figurehead, Asha works diligently in the background. Things slowly start to fall apart as Cyrus continues to grow more successful, and when their platform results in the death of one of its users, both Cyrus and Asha are at a crossroads with their business, and with each other.
Tahmina Anam is an award-winning author, and her previous works, like “The Good Muslim” and “A Golden Age” have received immense amounts of praise. “The Start-up Wife” is her newest novel, and it is the only one I have read by this author (so far).
Asha is both female and Bangladeshi, working in a male dominated tech world, and her relationship with Cyrus forces her to take a backseat to his brilliance, in both the marriage and their work. Asha herself admits that she “makes herself smaller” so that Cyrus can “be bigger”, and this is just one of many feminist themes in this novel. If anything, “The Start-Up Wife” will get you thinking.
I loved Asha as a protagonist- I found her to be both fierce and brilliant. Cyrus was a less likable character for me. He was entitled and arrogant, adored by others because of his charm, but completely unable to do anything on his own. He was smart, in a dreamy, theoretical way, but his success was based utterly on his ability to relate to other people socially. As the business grew, I sided with Asha in every argument, and wanted her to realize her potential and branch out on her own. It was easy to see, though, how these two worked together as a couple, and their relationship was realistic and believable.
The story was told well, even if the language was very techy and “millennial”, as computer nerds working in the Google-like offices of Utopia develop apps and platforms that will help users when the apocalypse comes. It was a little beyond my means of understanding sometimes, but I was thoroughly invested in the characters, and the inner workings of computer development was intriguing (even if, as a completely computer illiterate reader, I did not always understand it).
“The Start-Up Wife” is modern, informative and extremely relevant. The romance between Cyrus and Asha, set with a techy, computer-development backdrop, rampant with feminist themes, is both unique and engaging. Anam is a clever writer, full of talent, and I look forward to exploring more of her novels!

Tahmima Anam introduces us to newlyweds Asha and Cyrus along with their friend Jules develop an App that replaces religious rituals and find themselves running one of the most popular social media platforms in the world in her book The Startup Wife. The App is plausible and shows us the good, bad and ugly of AI. This book is often referred to as satirical, however, it didn’t entirely hit the mark for me.


Thank you #netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

There were lots of things to like about this book, including the inside view of what it takes to run a startup and the way it raises thought-provoking questions about the power of religion, spirituality, and technology. Unfortunately it didn't grab me as much as I wanted it to. Somehow the plot didn't yank me in and propel me through the story, making me eager to find out what happened next. However, I am glad I read it. Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the opportunity.

This was an enjoyable story that showed me some of the inside of starting up a tech company and morphing into the deadly power that comes with such a mass following. Asha was a brilliant character and you know she will do even greater things.

This novel flowed, just like a startup, from idea to IPO, cover to cover. I found myself doing something I rarely do with books, or at least that I haven’t done for a while. I savoured this one. I typically read or listen to one book a day. Bear in mind it’s my job right now, so spending 4-5 hours reading or listening to an audiobook is a half day’s work.

This book was different in that I indulged a little each day over the course of a few days, taking in just a couple of chapters at a time. I looked forward to each night curled up on the sofa, with a cup of tea, reading about Asha and her WAI startup.

Anam’s prose is vividly descriptive. She sets the scene of Utopia right away and manages to capture the ridiculousness of startup culture so accurately that the book is hilarious at times.

I felt invested in the characters from the beginning and enjoyed watching them evolve with the plot. I especially loved Li Ann and found that Tahmima didn’t even need to describe her, I could just picture her in my mind. Li Ann has a little spark within her and I adored her ever expanding entrepreneurial imagination. She embodies so many of the traits of those working in startup culture.

At the heart of this novel, there seemed to be a clear message. We need more females in technology. I worked for a Bay Area technology startup, and it’s an issue that needs to be constantly brought to the forefront. I appreciated the Anam’s attention to detail in writing about this, the fact that it was noticeable but also subtle. Had it been overpowering, it might have taken away from the beautiful love story between Asha and Cyrus, which grew increasingly more interesting as the novel progressed.

To conclude, this was a very enjoyable read, and a frighteningly accurate portrayal of life in a startup incubator.

www.avocadodiaries.com

The Startup Wife explores startup culture and being a woman in tech through the eyes of Asha Ray, who alongside her husband Cyrus and their friend Jules comes up with an idea for a new social media platform that uses sophisticated algorithms to create religious experiences for people. It takes off rapidly, leading to moral complications as it escalates.

The Startup Wife encapsulates startup culture to an uncomfortably accurate degree. From coworking spaces that feel both whimsical and cult-like, to the kinds of people you meet living the #startuplife – the kind who have brilliant and innovative ideas on the surface but the second you get to know them a little bit more you realize that they are just terrible people.

Case in point, Cyrus Jones. I have never met a fictional character I wanted to punch in the genitals until now. The inspiration behind the platform for his wildly creative ideas for creating “religious experiences without religion,” Cyrus reads like a Manic Pixie Dream Boy at times, and at others, he reads like an absolute manbaby who steamrolls Asha as his wife and co-founder whenever she deigns to disagree with him.

In conclusion, the book is very well-written and a realistic portrayal of what the world would do with technology that would allow them fantastical religious experiences and community-building. It feels grounded and satisfying in the end, but if you have complicated feelings about startup culture and the people who partake, you might need to prepare for some discomfort. Maybe bring some emotional support.

I enjoyed the unique perspective of the narrator, Asha, as she navigates the startup world as a woman of colour, a highly intelligent and competent “techie”, and as a wife of a rather disturbing husband, Cyrus. The premise of the story itself is interesting but I felt that the concept of WAI made no sense; the story didn’t “pitch” the app or explain what it even does or how it works quite as well as I was hoping it would given that it was supposed to change how humans connected with each other and the world forever(?). It is rather one dimensional.

If there is anything I’ve learned from my years in the religious studies academia sphere it’s to avoid people like Cyrus; his fascination with fusing rituals was so cringe. I have come to loathe Cyrus and everything he represents with great intensity. Despite the author’s attempts of developing him into some sort of character that is charismatic, extremely intelligent, and fits into the “Silicon Valley” cliche somehow, Cyrus is just vile. He comes across as a narcissistic man-child who is manipulative and frequently gaslights Asha. Surely a feminist character as incredibly likeable and well developed as Asha couldn’t put up with Cyrus. But she does time after time. This becomes quite tiring.

I felt that the first 75% of the book was so slow-paced and the story only really picked up towards the end. I wish that instead of the long drawn out descriptions of startup stereotypes (ie, trampolines in offices, rosemary or birch water being offered, smoking oxygen, etc.), we had the opportunity to read more about how Asha takes centre stage. I felt this is where the story could have actually begun rather than ended.

I’m glad to have had the opportunity to read this book, and although I have grown fond of Asha, this is a book I am soon likely to forget.

This ARC was kindly provided by NetGalley and Simon and Schuster publishers in exchange for an honest review.

This is a perfect summer read. I loved reading the storing of Asha, a hardworking techie girl trying to navigate the start up life. The story has all the rollercoaster ride events that we expect from a story set in entrepreneurial world from finding the idea, partners, seed funding, investors, stellar launches and few stumbling moments along the way. This book will grab your attention and leave you keep you wanting for more. I would recommend this book!!

SUCH a smart book.

I loved the whole concept behind WAI (the startup) - sent me into a spiral of research on what something like that would actually look like. I also loved the relationship in the story - it felt so real, urgent but not perfect, the individuals are flawed and the relationship is flawed too but somehow perfect in its entirety - I'm not quite sure I'm doing justice. I liked the whole story arc around startup culture, the incubator, and all the characters that came with it - the lifecycle is fascinating to me as a consumer. As a South Asian, I also completely identified with Asha and her sister, from the food smells in the bag to always having to be twice as good to be half as appreciated. I also liked the timeline of the story that ends just before the pandemic starts - I'm honestly curious as to how 2020 and everything we went through is going to shape media and this book is part of that media.

To be honest, I was mad at the MC for losing herself, despite being the smart woman she is. But then again, I consider myself smart, independent woman as well (or something like that), but I can very well see myself, under the right circumstances, being swept along and into the shadow of a man. So, I don't blame her.

If anything, the story meandered a little bit, I put down the book a couple of times because of it. But the meandering was never enough to completely derail the story.

3.5/5. I very much look forward to Anam's future projects, they have potential and the characters they've created are fascinating.

This is such a smart, funny book with loads of insights on race, privilege, ego, and marriage dynamics.

Asha has had a crush on Cyrus since high school. Now in her twenties, when Cyrus re-enters Asha’s life, they begin a whirlwind romance that very quickly leads them to marriage and creating a new tech startup, called WAI. Asha decides to drop out of her PhD program to write this algorithm and give it her all. Early in the process Cyrus, the charismatic and vastly intelligent high school dropout, states that he does not want to be involved in the business aspect of WAI, but rather as a researcher. Jules, Cyrus’ best friend, joins the team and together they embark on trying to revolutionize, and ultimately save the planet should the apocalypse occur (ambitious), how people use social media through these personalized rituals. When WAI becomes a huge hit these three struggle with the problems that come with overnight success, wealth and power imbalances.

Tahmima Aman has cleverly delved into what it’s like being a BIPOC woman in a male-dominated industry, how a white man can claim the work of a BIPOC as his own, and how all of this can breed entitlement and over-inflated egos. I was rolling my eyes with Asha at many of the mansplaining sections in this book. Like hello guys, she literally wrote the program.

This is a quick, humorous read that shows the potential dark side of the tech industry. I will now read anything that this author publishes.

Thank you to Netgalley, Scribner, and Simon & Schuster for an ARC. Much appreciated.

Asha is brilliant and is working on a way to give artificial intelligence human empathy skills when she re-meets her high school crush, Cyrus, realizes he's also in love with her and they get married. The whirlwind romance leads to a whirlwind startup when she tells him about her work and realizes she could use some of it to create something new with him, described by some as something like a 'human spirit guide.' He creates custom rituals for non-religious people, helping them mark significant moments in time (births, deaths, marriages) in non-traditional ways. So Asha creates the platform, pulling from Cyrus' mind to build a custom algorithm that will spit out recommendations for a non-traditional event based on users' desires and existing beliefs. The third person at the helm is Jules, Cyrus' best friend.

Not only is the app intriguing to the right people (the team of three is adopted by an ultra-exclusive startup called Utopia and backed by a deep-pocketed investor), but when it launches, it's popular - like, really popular. And before Asha knows it, everything has changed and her happy marriage-turned-partnership is experiencing just a few bumps in the road as she struggles with her place in the company and the relationship.

This books is an afternoon read, super cute and fun and (almost annoyingly) timely with mention of COVID at the end (although, mentioned as the start of the apocalypse which tbh was not entirely appreciated). I'd recommend it as a cottage read for people interested in the world of tech (lots of fun jargon used) looking for something quick.