It took me a month to read this.

This is the worst book I have read all year. It was incredibly pretentious and painfully boring. It also wasn't even a love story. Maybe that was supposed to be ironic? Either way, I am not amused. I would not have finished the book if it weren't for the fact that I had an ARC. I am honestly confused on what the heck this book was trying to say and/or accomplish. I feel like I was lied to by the synopsis frankly.

Audiobook note: I know it was narrator was the author, and while I usually enjoy that for nonfiction books, it only added to my overall hatred of the book. It was so monotone and a chore to listen to.

Liquid is a sharp, witty debut that blends satire with heart. Following a disillusioned PhD grad on a quest to marry rich, the story takes a powerful turn in Tehran, exploring identity and belonging. Smart, funny, and refreshingly original.

Funny and unique. I loved listening to this one. I love a romcom and this delivered. Looking forward to more from this author.

I’ll admit that for the first few chapters, I wasn’t particularly taken with this book. I actually considered DNFing quite early on, but I stuck with it and it more than redeemed itself!

The book is split into two parts, one set in the USA and one in Iran. While the latter was much more compelling, the set-up of the first half was necessary to get there. In the first half we meet the main character and her mother (my personal favourite character), and we’re introduced to their complex relationship. The tone is fairly light-hearted, with witty observations about class, money, academia, and romance.

The tone is very different in the second half. Much like in real life, when something terrible happens, everything changes. It was very jarring but I think it was to good effect, and took the story on a sharp turn from the trajectory it had been on.

The final few chapters were the crowning glory, as the main character deals with grief, the fallout of her bereavement and inheritance, and starts to rebuild her life. The way Mariam Rahmani managed to bring all of the themes from the first half into those final chapters for the perfect full circle was masterful, and turned this from a good book into a great book.

I went into this book not really knowing what to expect, and I’m so glad I stuck with it. What started as a romcom-style story became a brilliantly observational slice-of-life story, and I absolutely loved it.

I received a free copy for an honest review.

I went into this one with curiosity, but came out feeling a bit... unsure. It was messy, not in a cute, chaotic, and slightly delulu way, but more like someone’s notes fell off the coffee table and they just ran with it. Timelines and small details didn’t always line up, and that lack of structure made it hard to stay engaged.

The main character didn’t help either. She carries herself with this air of superiority that made it difficult to connect or even care much about what she was going through.

The author narrates the audiobook herself, and while she captured the distant tone of the main character, the monotone delivery didn’t help with pacing. Jokes that might have worked better on the page fell flat in audio.

That said, there were things I appreciated. The social critique? Spot on. The spreadsheet theme? J’adore. And the shift in tone halfway through brought in deeper themes that kept me curious enough to finish, even if it took some effort.

Parts of the writing tried to build a bestie-style intimacy with the reader, but it didn’t land for me. It felt forced, and combined with moments of overly performative prose, I often felt more alienated than drawn in.

A mixed bag overall. Some clever ideas, but not quite the execution I was hoping for.

I quite enjoyed this story. I liked the premise, that our narrator is planning to marry rich, and how she plots out how to make this happen.

And while this is a story of love, it's also a critique of that love story. In the book the narrator talks about Western and Eastern ideals of love and marriage, and I feel like this story critiques both of those, and shows us something different. Even when our narrator thinks she knows what she wants, maybe that's not how this story is meant to go.

Jaded academic spiraling sad girl lit with a side of identity and belonging issues A combo like this is my catnip and I will never stop picking up variations of these tropes. I think the subtitle “A Love Story” sort of adds genre expectations that don’t get met in the classical sense. There is a quest for love (or at least a good pairing), but it definitely comes through in the form of figuring out one's self and this one is heavy on the lit fic. Rahmani’s does something unique here. Things are very different and more carefree in the LA part of the book and the shift to Tehran comes abruptly and with a tone change. I can see this being a bit jarring to some readers but it felt very realistic to me given the context. Rahmani used the contrast as an opportunity to explore how who we are gets impacted by circumstances and location.

I mostly listened to this one on audio, narrated by the author and I enjoyed it on audio. I think Rahmani was able to match the slightly dead inside mood of the MC well in this one.

Liquid isn’t a story you simply listen to—it’s one you absorb, like light through stained glass. Mariam Rahmani’s voice—both as author and narrator—carries a lyrical, almost hypnotic quality that draws you into a world where identity isn’t fixed, but fluid, like water shifting between containers.

This audiobook feels intimate, like overhearing someone’s innermost thoughts in the quiet dark. It's bold, tender, and unapologetically complex, exploring queerness, cultural dislocation, and womanhood with a poet’s precision and a rebel’s heart. The pacing is intentional, the silences just as powerful as the words.

Rahmani doesn’t offer easy answers—she invites you to float in the ambiguity, to feel your way through the depth of what it means to belong, to question, to become. It's the kind of listening experience that asks you to pause, rewind, and sit with the echoes.

Liquid is not just a book—it’s a meditation, a reckoning, and a quiet revolution whispered straight into your soul.

I love books like this that really dive into an imperfect narrator/main character. This book is great for fans of The Coin by Yasmin Zaher.

First half ingadge Turing the age and did the audio
I liked the dating experiment and her hits and thoughts on her spreadsheet
Funny and a bit deep in some ways then about 50% of the book lost me took a turn sad and felt disconnected to the first half
And kept lingering one a bit to slow and long

What started out irreverent and some how also pretentious, evolved into something raw and heart wrenching with a beautiful ending.
The beginning had a lot of people thrown at you, beautiful prose and a lot of references that made me feel kind of stupid. I have a pretty good vocabulary but this one was a little beyond me. Looking back I guess that was accurate to the characters as I do not have a literary degree and they do.

All in all, it was kind of a wild ride but very unique. Thank you Netgalley for the copy of the audiobook!

An "it was always you" rom-com, but also a literary, feminist Indo-Iranian-American coming-of-age saga.

An ode to rom-coms really, with a respectful nod to English and Muslim literature and academia, both as a career and a way of life.

Includes a positive mother-daughter relationship, all things considered.

A recent PhD graduate, now adjunct professor, finds herself grappling with decisions in both her personal and professional life. Striving to please her successful mother in who is also in academia, the narrator receives word that her position will no longer be funded, and she loses her graduate student housing, thus impacting her greatly.
Determined to make changes, she embarks on an effort to go on 100 dates over the course of a summer. While this is categorized in several genres, I would caution readers who are looking for solely romance. This is a complicated novel that involves how one’s culture comes into play into making them who they are and who they wish to be.
The author narrated the audio and provided inflection and intonation where needed. Many thanks to NetGalley and Hachette Audio for the advance copy. All opinions are my own.

✨ Review ✨ Liquid by Mariam Rahmani

Thanks to Algonquin Books, Hachette Audio, and #netgalley for the gifted advanced copy/ies of this book!

The Iranian-Indian American narrator of Liquid is an underemployed adjunct professor with a best-friend poet Adam trying to figure out how she’s going to survive in Los Angeles without a job. She decides golddigging is the solution -- she decides to go on 100 dates over the summer to try to find a rich spouse, but ultimately, her dating finds LA’s rich men and women are predominantly white, boring, not adequate, etc.

The story shifts after her dad has a heart attack and she ends up on a plane back to Tehran, living in his home, while he’s in the hospital. It explores her relationships with her mom and her dad, and a neighbor who she hooks up with multiple times while staying there. I really appreciated the reflection on 21st-century Tehran, and the legacies of its fraught relationship with the US (lack of access to hospital equipment, uneven gendered rights, etc.).

This is a hard book because I loved it and I hated it - it made me laugh so hard and roll my eyes at the portrayal of academia, because it's so on the nose! But it's also so highbrow and critical that sometimes it over-the-top frustrated me. I loved the idea of a golddigging underemployed academic, whose PhD is in marriage and literature. I am obsessed with the focus on the dating spreadsheet (and even more with the spreadsheet excerpt that appears between parts of the book). But I also wanted to put this down and quit repeatedly too and that makes it hard to rate. In the end, I'm glad I stuck with it, but it was not an easy journey...which is maybe some of the point. This is a book to read and struggle with, but it's not for the light of heart.

Genre: literary fiction
Setting: Los Angeles, Tehran
Pub Date: March 11, 2025

This novel follows an unnamed narrator as she tries to figure out her future in life and love. It is a reflective look at her life as a half-Iranian and half-Indian woman living in the US and what that means. I really enjoyed the introspection of the character and learning about her life. The second half of the novel was very different from the first, but I liked it and thought it showed how the difficult circumstances were helping her grow and learn. I don't think I would call this a love story in the traditional sense, but I thought this was a quick, interesting read. I got an ALC from NetGalley, and it was read by the author and I thought she was a fabulous narrator for this novel.

This will absolutely be one of the most memorable books I read all year. I finished it a few days ago and I can’t stop thinking about it. And here’s the thing- I didn’t love it. It’s one of those novels you read knowing that it’s well written, but too smart for you, so you try to push through but get bored somewhere along the way. Until of course, you’re one week post the lackluster ending and the story resides rent free in your brain. It’s perhaps the subversive and often flippant tone of dating in the first half of the book, married with the depth and complexity of grief and culture and family pressures of the latter half that really made me think. Our heroine may start out looking for someone with the liquid assets she’s picturing, but along the journey, she finds more than she planned. And yet- it’s not at all a hallmark movie ending here. It’s uncomfortable and realistic and messy. Literary fiction for the academia audience for sure. 3.75 ⭐️ I think?

Thank you NetGalley and Hachette Audio for the opportunity to listen to and review this audiobook.

hmm, this is an extraordinarily well-written novel that doesn't really strive to have a rounded out plot, it just exists in the land of vibes and reminded me quite a bit of Elif Batuman's The Idiot - that's a truly accurate comp.

our protagonist is Iranian-Indian American and she's just trying to exist in a post-academic world where being and flourishing means finding employment. much like most of us who went to school, her degree isn't doing much for her. jobs are few and far between. jobs that pay a living wage are fewer and further between.

over a dinner with her bff adam, present to dissect the latest exploits of his bad girlfriend who regularly cheats on him, adam tells her she's going to have to marry rich. and it's bleak in that way that the world is kind of bleak now - dark humor that suggest we all need to make choices we may not love in order to survive in the world. but our protagonist takes him seriously and decides that she'll go on 100 dates with the intent of finding a spouse. kudos here for the queerness. the dates that she ends up going on are bad, but they swiftly come to an end when her father has a heart attack and she has to go back to tehran to be with her family.

for me, the second half of the book was more engaging and interesting. though i liked our protagonist's plan to go on 100 dates, i feel like those dates were written about like bits she was telling and not as though i was reading a story. the second half was so much more successful in this and i felt like i learned more about who our protagonist was instead of just what she was doing. as a result, the book felt a bit disjoined.

i'm not sure what the main message was. maybe that love comes in lots of different forms? if so, the message i'm not sure was clear. that said, i do think this was extremely well-written and though it came off slightly pretentious, i really loved the style and would read from this author again.

Thank you to Netgalley for the arc audio of this story. It was short listen, but very enjoyable. I recommend listening to it. The narrators voice was very good.

I did not finish this book. I couldn't get into this book, Content was way too much for me. The narrator/tone made me super uncomforable.

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

I started this book with low expectations, especially since the title “Liquid” is so vague, but I finished pleasantly happy, albeit still not understanding the title.

It’s the story of an unnamed American narrator of Iranian-Indian descent living in LA. Finding herself adrift having been laid off from her university position, she ventures in her own thesis based on our favorite romcoms to find a rich husband. However, the story takes a turn when her father has a heart attack and she’s forced to return to Tehran. What starts as a journey to find her rich husband, becomes a journey of self-discovery across two different continents and three different cultural identities.

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