Mariam Rahmani’s Liquid is a thought-provoking and introspective novel that delves deep into cultural expectations, identity, and personal struggle. While the story unfolds at a slower pace, it allows readers to fully immerse themselves in the protagonist’s emotional world and the weight of societal pressures she faces.

Rahmani’s writing is richly detailed, offering a deeply personal and raw perspective on the character’s journey. The novel’s strength lies in its ability to capture the protagonist’s inner turmoil, making her experiences feel vivid and relatable. Certain moments in the story stand out for their emotional impact, particularly in how the character navigates challenges with resilience and self-awareness.

While the pacing may not be for everyone, those who appreciate literary fiction with layered themes will find Liquid a compelling read. Rahmani crafts a narrative that is both intimate and universal, shedding light on the complexities of cultural identity in a way that lingers long after the final page.

A young Muslim adjunct professor finds herself somewhat stuck in her life. She is unsure if she will have a job in the Autumn, she lives alone in LA and is no longer sure about what she wants for the future. She decides maybe she should give up on academia and marry rich . Commiting herself to 100 dates over the course of the Summer, the first half of this book was entertaining, funny and I enjoyed the tone and perspective of our unnamed narrator.
Her summer plans swerve when she has to travel to Tehran when her father becomes unwell. The tone of the book switches at this point as our main character spends time in Tehran. This section of the book was fascinating, I enjoyed reading the descriptions of the area, food, climate and the changing perspective of the character.
Overall there is a lot to love in this book. The main character is fascinating, her conflicts, attitude , personality and circumstances make for an engaging read and the dual location works well. The writing is polished, sharp and I enjoyed the social commentary, yet something held me back from fully falling for this book.
The audio is decent, the author narrates the book herself which for me , very much worked for the parts of the book set in the US but maybe lacked a tiny bit of emotion in the parts of the book that required it. I think I possibly would have enjoyed this one more had I read rather than listened.
Nonetheless, it is a decent read and one I would very much recommend. Entertaining, informative, funny and sharp.

3.5- 4

Thanks to NetGalley and Hachette Audio for an advanced listening copy of Liquid! Narrated by the author herself, Rahmani relays the story of our unnamed protagonist in a way that no one else could. I'm not sure how much of this story has been borrowed from Rahmani's own life and experiences, but her narration provided a depth and resonance that still lingers long after the last sentence has been read.

Stuck at the intersectionality of her Iranian-Indian heritage and American upbringing, our protagonist decides to put her academic background to good use and conduct a dating experiment to satisfy her parents' desire to her to settle down and start a family. What happens when you set a deadline for the beginning of fall semester with the goal of 100 dates & a successful marriage proposal? A slightly manic, slightly chaotic love life ensures.

I will say, the plot of this book was not what I expected. I went in thinking this would be a fun and light romcom, with some elements of humor tied to the vast number of dates and people that the unnamed narrator would enlist in her experiment. This ended up being a much more academic pursuit by the narrator, who remained quite emotionally detached from the experience, with very little humor or traditional romcom tropes.

She becomes much more introspective when her father's health crisis takes her back to Tehran, but her epiphany and the way the story ultimately ended didn't feel even slightly organic. It might've been different had the protagonist created any sense of emotional attachment or resonance throughout the rest of the story, but she remained so aloof and removed from her own love life that her abrupt 180 at the very end of the book felt forced.

Characters - 2.5/5
Plot - 3/5
Setting - 3/5
Themes - 3.5/5
Writing Style - 3.5/5

An enjoyable if flawed read.

Let’s start with the good stuff: i loved Rahmani’s fluid, introspective writing, and she gives us a heroine who is as easy to root for as they come. I also loved the protagonist’s discussion of her academic work and how she tried to apply it to her personal life.

Where this book falls a bit short is mostly about the jarring tone shift mid-novel that leaves one feeling like they’ve read two books about the same character written by two different authors with two very different agendas for both message and tone. Instead of a natural progression into heavier material, the book just makes a giant, discordant leap in tone and subject matter, and it doesn’t work as a cohesive story.

The book also isn’t truly funny, which makes the publisher’s summary a bit misleading. The summary also leans heavily on the first half of the book (the superior half, in my opinion), which makes the leap the second half takes even more jarring and inapt.

Still, I love the way Rahmani writes inner monologue, as well as the way she ruminates on the difficulty of squaring disparate cultural values, be they your own, your parents’, or your broader world’s.

Messy girls doing messy things are usually my jam, but I just couldn’t connect with this particular main character. Something about her felt a little flat, and I found myself struggling to stay engaged with her choices and motivations. That said, I can see how others might resonate with her story—especially if they relate to the chaos she’s navigating. This one just wasn’t for me, but I’m sure it’ll hit harder for the right reader!

what a complicated book for me to review. i want to start out by saying i don’t think this book was bad at all i just don’t think i was the intended target audience.

there were a couple of things i didn’t quite enjoy though. for example i found the plot to be a bit confusing at times and it felt incomplete. the blurb advertised that it would take a 180 after something happened to the main characters life, but it lost the original plot all together.

the main character starts this book looking for love and trying to get married. then something happens and she has to go back to the country her family is from to help. she kind of keeps looking for love, but like not really? and then the ending just felt super rushed.

i think the message was supposed to be that love doesn’t always have to be romantic? but idk

also to go back to me not being the target audience, this book talked a lot about sciency math, romance, and countries i’m not super familiar with. i enjoyed learning about these new things, but sometimes i also did find that it made me bored because i didn’t quite understand.

i will say however though, that i listened to the audiobook version of this book and i found the narration to be super smooth. i enjoyed my time listening even if i did get lost in the plot sometimes.

i would say that i recommend this book to select people and am curious to see how other people rate it. i just personally found it a little forgettable unfortunately. i am so so so happy though that i got the chance to read and review this book for netgalley and Hachette Audio! thank you so much for the opportunity!

I enjoyed this quite a bit. The writing is sharp and sparse in the best way, and the main character is interesting to follow. I especially appreciated seeing her in Tehran reflecting on her relationship with her parents and figuring out where she felt at home. And I loved the premise of a PhD student using a spreadsheet to find the person she wants to marry and...I won't spoil the ending but it was perfect.

I am having a hard time knowing what to make of this book! It's subtitle is "A Love Story." I know now that this is being used in a different sense than what one might think to begin with. I expected this book to be about all her dates trying to marry rich and not have to worry about her own job providing for her any more. While she did go on the 100 dates, they were very glossed over and seemed to be a lot more about hook-ups than looking for a relationship (thank goodness it is not explicit!)
I think the story was suppose to get more deep when she goes back to Iran with her mother to her father's deathbed, but it just wasn't enough for me. In the end, I feel like overall this was a missed opportunity to take an interesting premise that we could all connect to, but instead it just skimmed the surface.
Thank you to #NetGalley and @HatchettAudio for my ARC audio of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I was very excited about this one, and enjoyed the first half. I felt like this became an entirely different book halfway through. I don't know how fitting 100 dates into 320 pages managed to feel slow. I couldn't get as invested in the MC's relationship to her mom, or frankly, the romantic interest that takes up the second half. It also ended very abruptly. On the whole, I'll look for more from Rahmani, but this one didn't quite get there for me.

An American woman with Iranian and Indian parents dedicates her life to going on a 100 dates after, Adam, her best friend suggest she marries rich, since she is not seeing the success in academics she was hoping for.

This book was a lot! While being a contemporary novel, it felt very auto-fiction at times, the way it jumped around from humor, to spontaneous anthropological, cultural, and political academic critique, to healing deep emotional wounds. It felt personally unique experience, and I appreciate that a lot. The reading experience was quite jumbled and lacked a certain focus. I felt a little like being tossed around to too many places, and I left the book not feeling quite sure of what my take away was.

Reading it through audiobook was not the right choice for me with this one. While I always adore the author reading their own work, the flow didn't sound right. When the narrator's more thought provoking reflections came up, I didn't take them in the same way I would have, being able to read it physically. Which definitely affected my overall enjoyment of this book.

Our MC is quite bitter, cold and sarcastic and I found myself enjoying the book more, as she was getting more inspired and aligning herself with her values and truth towards the end of the book. The last chapter in Tehran was so lovely and I wish the book would have ended there. When the last chapter of the book finished I just went "Urgh!" as the foreshadowing throughout the book had been so obvious, and I couldn't believe the story was actually going there.

I can't wait to flip through the book physically and reread some parts around the more academic thoughts and lived experiences of the main character, as there were some incredible nuggets that I found fascinating. If your lived experience of cultural background is similar to the main characters, I think this book could be quite powerful.

Thank you to Netgalley, Hachette Audio, & Algonquin Books for granting me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

• always thinking herself the smartest person in every room, the book’s unnamed narrator decides to go on 100 dates to find herself a rich spouse when she’s unable to create the life she imagined two years after getting her phd. but when tragedy strikes in tehran, she suddenly finds herself in the middle of a familial reckoning, altering every plan she had for herself.
• this book is told in two very distinct parts, that at first felt disjointed, but ultimately i found satisfying paired with the narrator’s voice.
• while the ‘a love story’ subtitle might seem disingenuous at first, i do think this book worked well as a story of a woman seeking ‘love’ to secure financial security, as well as an examination of her parents’ marriage.

I love self-aware pretentiousness in a narrator. It reminded me in that way of The Idiot or Bunny but also totally unique from those. A bi, Muslim woman, in the wake of losing out on a job and the recent Muslim ban announcement, decides to give up on making a career with her PhD in Literature and focus on marrying rich. I'm still trying to figure out why it's called Liquid, though. I also forgot it was a love story for most of it.

This book is good but not what I expected and where I expected a love story ( according to the title ) it was more of a cultural study and self exploration. Certainly an interesting look at cultural identity , love, marriage and sexuality

My rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

I really enjoyed the audio . I think the author did a really
Great job narrating her story

Audio rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

When I picked the book up, I thought it would be fun and enjoyable! Started off with main character going on 100 dates, then there’s a quick change and I feel like the book completely switched tone. I thought the messiness of the main character was realistic. When we go through changes, we can be really unlikeable, even to ourselves. However, I think the book felt messy in a few other ways that weren’t necessarily good.

This was actually my first ever audiobook and I’m pleased to report that I enjoyed it! It was a great choice to have the author narrate it as we really got to appreciate the tone and inflection of the dialogue, and I loved how she did her mother’s voice 😆 I found it quite slow and listened at 1.5x.

I think the title and the blurb make it sound a little more romcom-y than it actually is, and I enjoyed the darker tone of the second half.

The ending felt a little obvious and disappointing but maybe I would’ve been annoyed if that didn’t happen!

2.75 stars

I love such books where the protagonist explores him/herself throughout the course of life and eventually appears as a developed character after numerous ups and downs. That is the very first reason I can remember I picked this one. The blurb sounded really promising according to my taste. But now I realize that maybe I wasn't the kind of target audience for this one. Because almost the whole time I was asking myself, what is really to absorb from this work of literature. Nothing significant was happening. Or maybe I wasn't simply getting that. Or maybe the audiobook is the reason why I felt like this. ( and I have found so many other reviews where readers have expressed same issues with the audiobook...)

But suddenly everything got better after 70%...the writing, the narration, the emotional effects of grief and loss...everything was starting to make sense together and the character development at this point was at the peak. I really enjoyed the last portion of this book. And I got relieved that it at least gave something.

The main thing about this one is I couldn't connect to any of these characters mostly. All of them felt too superficial and at the end of the day, it is not a love story and it is not unforgettable or impactful.

It was a two star the whole time but the last portion of the story was comparatively better so 2.75 stars for now.

Thanks to the publisher, Algonquin Books, Hachette Audio and Netgalley for kindly gifting me this ALC. I really appreciate that.

This was a very interesting read. The flow and vibe of the narrator made for a unique experience. I definitely think this love story will offer something very new to queer literature. I love the 100 dates idea and the growth that happens through the experience. It’s a wonderful debut and I look forward to more from this writer.

Liquid by Mariam Rahmani is an evocative and intimate exploration of the complexities of human emotions, relationships, and self-discovery. This debut novel, while not perfect, offers a unique narrative experience that leaves listeners contemplating the fluidity of personal growth and connection.

The story centers on the protagonist, a young woman navigating a sea of internal and external turmoil. Rahmani's writing shines in its portrayal of vulnerability, as the character contemplates love, identity, and belonging. While the plot itself occasionally falters in pacing and development, the themes of self-exploration and transformation are powerfully conveyed, leaving a lasting emotional resonance.

One of the standout features of this audiobook is Mariam Rahmani’s narration. As the author herself lends her voice to the project, it adds a layer of authenticity and emotional depth that is often difficult to replicate with a separate narrator. Rahmani’s delivery brings the story to life, especially in moments of introspection, where her tone perfectly matches the protagonist’s inner conflicts. The fluidity of her performance mirrors the central themes of the book, with her voice subtly shifting to emphasize the ebb and flow of the character’s emotional state.

However, there are moments where the pace of the story and Rahmani’s narration can feel a bit slow, which might cause some listeners to lose focus. While the quiet moments of reflection are necessary for the character's growth, the narrative occasionally drags, which can impact the overall listening experience. Additionally, some parts of the plot may leave listeners yearning for more development or resolution.

Despite these minor shortcomings, Liquid is an audiobook worth experiencing, particularly for those who appreciate nuanced, introspective storytelling. Mariam Rahmani’s skillful narration enhances the overall enjoyment of the audiobook, making it a compelling choice for anyone looking for a deeply emotional, yet reflective, listen.

Overall, I would rate Liquid 3.75 stars. While it doesn’t quite reach the heights of a perfect listen, Rahmani’s unique storytelling voice, both as an author and narrator, elevates the audiobook enough to make it a noteworthy experience for fans of literary fiction.

LIQUID by Mariam Rahmani had vibes reminiscent of books like VLADIMIR, RIPE, and ACTS OF DESPERATION. The narration and the prose was well-done, but the story was difficult to follow and felt tedious to continue to read at times - boring is a strong word, but there were parts of this book that getting through felt like homework.

I really liked the idea of this book. I did not like the main character at all and thought there would be much more humor to the story. This is also the second book where the author narrated their own book and unless it is a celebrity they just should not do it. You need tone and inflection when speaking. Overall I just thought it would be better than it was.