Review: Rebel Hard

Rebel Hard by Nalini Singh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nayna Sharma has always been a people-pleaser, especially after her older sister eloped and moved to Australia. Now she has agreed to an arranged marriage, but the picking are slim. She and her BFF go to a client's party and Nayna kisses a hot guy as a desperate attempt at a fling before she settles down and abandons all her dreams of travel and adventure for good.

Raj Sen runs his family's construction business. Having been adopted as a child, Raj is desperate for a traditional marriage, a wife at home and deep family roots. When he kisses a hot girl at a party he is blown away, until she tells him to shut up because she only wants him for his body.

Flash forward, guess who Nayna's next candidate is for an arranged marriage - yes, none other than Raj. His parents like her, what Indian parents wouldn't love a woman who is a successful accountant and honours her family? Her parents like him, he might be blue-collar but he runs the family business. Raj and Nayna start a tentative relationship, but do their differing life goals spell out trouble?

I found it difficult to get into this book, maybe because I found it hard to reconcile Nayna being a 28 year old virgin with her climbing Raj like a tree when they first met. Maybe it's that I found Nayna's new found independence equally as odd, when she'd been such a doormat her whole life. Maybe it wa the idea that a woman agrees to an arranged marriage, then finds one candidate is a man she finds totally hot, funny, smart etc and yet she suddenly gets cold feet about the arranged marriage.

Anyway, up until about one-third of the way into this book I struggled to engage with the characters, even now I think Raj was just a bit too perfect to be true, he needed to be a bit more human.

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