Reviews with content warning for Cursing - Make Up Break Up

Reviews tagging 'Cursing'

Make Up Break Up by Sandhya Menon, Lily Menon

2 reviews

spearly's review

lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

"Detest" was a strong word. So were "abhor" and "despise" and "loathe". Annika, being a pacifist, preferred a different term - something her yoga teacher had said that struck a much more civil cord.

"I am elementally unaligned with you, Hudson Craft,"

Make Up Break Up Follows Annika Dev, a young female app developer as she competes with her arch enemy, Hudson Craft, at a pitch competition for a massive investment. The catch? Hudson Craft and his business, Break Up, have moved into the office next to hers. Oh, and they also had sex last summer at a conference. And... he may have stolen her app idea.

As a romance, this was a fairly straightforward book. Very predictable. Nothing butterfly-inducing (for me), which is one of my main criteria when rating a romance, especially the god-tier trope of enemies-to-lovers. Hudson was at least a little cheeky and we saw a bit of his many sides, but Annika felt verrryyy flat. This is clearly a new adult book but if it weren't for the swearing and the sex, I would think Annika was 16. She was petty, stubborn, and most of the time, immature. I didn't really understand her motivations for messing with Hudson, particularly after it's made clear that he

Spoiler

didn't steal her app idea

.

We LOVE to see women thriving in tech... but Make Up Break Up falls a bit short of any truly meaningful commentary on the barriers women face in the tech world. We get a snippet of it when Annika and Hudson go talk about their businesses at a school, but even then, we only get one line saying ~You can do it! Don't let anyone tell you you can't!~. It didn't go into any detail about the casual sexism women in tech face - especially a character like Annika, being a woman of colour. There is a much deeper story that could have been told here - Annika, a young Indian American woman struggling to find investors for her revolutionary dating app, while her white, male counterpart coasts in on an idea she thinks he stole, gets all the funding he needs, millions of downloads and users and dollars. It was really a missed opportunity.

Still, a quick read that had some cute chapters. Didn't end the way I thought it would -

Spoiler

Of course the romance did, but I though Annika and Hudson would join their apps together. Think of it: Make Up helps couples communicate, see a future together through innovative tech, and when all those options run out, there's an amicable break-up tool. Hudson deciding to shut down his app didn't feel like the most satisfying option - I would have liked to see how their very different approaches could have worked together instead to make something neither of them could have made on their own.

3 stars. It's was okay, not the best book I've ever written, but not so unenjoyable that it warrants a 2 star.

(though that cover needs a revamp, bad. This came out in Feb 2021 and it looks like a teen book circa 2014).

Content Warnings

jadeisabelle's review

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted fast-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

I received an early e-arc of Make Up Break Up by Lily Menon from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I was interested in reading Make Up Break Up as Lily Menon is the pen name of the author who wrote the When Dimple Met Rishi companion series and this is her first adult romance book. I am new to adult romance myself, and I think that if you're also a beginner adult romance reader, this could be a good starting point.
Make Up Break Up follows Annika Dev, an app developer who is the CEO of an app called Make Up which is basically a 'Google Translate' for couples, I thought that this app concept was really cool and the AI technology that the app uses would be interesting to see in an actual app.
Annika hooks up with Hudson Craft at a conference in Vegas sometime before the start of the book, and Hudson ends up being a rival app developer with his app Break Up. Hudson's app seems so similar to Make Up, which leads Annika to think he stole her idea.
So this was a slowish burn romance, and I think it had the issue of telling versus showing, there were a lot of scenes where I felt there could be more detail but weren't explored further. Annika was also repeating herself A LOT about Make Up and how she felt about Hudson.
I really liked the scene at the yoga studio, I thought it was really funny and there was just enough tension between the characters.
Also maybe this is just my pet peeve in romance but the characters never talked about contraception and I think it's kinda important before you have sex. Like number one is consent and number two is contraception, this book had the consent though.
Overall, I think Make Up Break Up was a good debut romance, and I understand it's really hard to break into writing a different genre and age group so I would give this book a 3 out of 5 stars.

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