Review: Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin
Hana Khan Carries On follows Hana Khan, a young intern at a Toronto radio station who hosts her own anonymous podcast and works at her family's halal restaurant. When Aydin and his father come to town to open their own restaurant and seemingly to put Hana's family out of business, Hana grapples with that lengths are too far to enact revenge while also realizing that Aydin might not be who she thought he was.
This book was a tad inconsistent for me, I loved the first half, liked the last 45%ish less, then really loved the ending. I was recommended this book by the romance podcast Fated Mates, it was in their ton ten romances of the year, and found a copy of this book in my bookstore's fiction section, and while I was reading I kept being confused about if this was a romance or general fiction. The main couple isn't together all that much, and Hana goes through my favorite of her plotlines (the radio station) almost entirely without Aydin being involved in it which is very atypical for a romance. I just kept being confused by genre. Which isn't bad but did pull me out of the story.
This is a romance and I do not understand why Hana likes Aydin. I understand why Aydin likes Hana, it is pretty obvious that he finds her attractive immediately upon meeting her and he is pretty sure she is the anonymous podcast host he is online friends with, but I just could not understand why she liked him until 60-75% of the way into the book. Then she was fully in love and I was just confused. I really needed more page time spent with the pair interacting. I also don't think that the central issue the pair had with each other for the first half of the book is even addressed enough. I really thought it deserved a much bigger conversation than it got, and Aydin is able to turn off his father's influence on him so quickly. I just wanted more from the emotional side of this story.
Speaking of Aydin, I really hated the twist he was involved in. I don't want to spoil it, though I did guess it pretty early in the book, it is a twist that I thought was very melodramatic and did not fit well with the tone of the rest of the book. I also thought it was just an absolutely massive paradigm-shifting revel and we never got to see the full emotional weight of. I feel like if you are going to introduce something this huge it really deserves so much more than what it got.
Other things I did not love were the racist mob leaving because people started dancing, they came in at 110% anger and are just diffused in like three minutes of drums, and the way Hana's friends were seemingly set up for a much larger story than they really got. There was just so much going on in this ~350-page book and I wanted more from almost all of them.
This sounds like I hated this book, I totally did not! There were many things I loved!
I really did love Hana as a character, she is absolutely fascinating and fierce and nuanced. I loved watching her grapple with who she is and how she wants to present herself to the world. Hana has to decide what she wants from the world, but also how much of herself she is willing to give up to actually get to a position to do what she wants. This is most apparent in the internship at the radio station. Hana and the other intern, an immigrant from India who disagrees with Hana on almost everything, are given the opportunity to pitch a show to the heads of the radio station, but what the station wants from Hana is ideologically abhorrent to Hana. They want feel-good cultural voyeurism and investigative pieces about the scary other, Hana wants to tell complex stories about all kinds of people, she does not want to be the token brown girl or to other her community further.
The character voice is really absolutely fabulous. Hana is such a strong main character, she makes mistakes and is flawed, but is also deeply sympathetic and relatable. You will leave this book wanting to be Hana's friend.
The family spent of this book really shines. You get Hana's immediate family who she lives with, her ill father who is so tender towards his daughter, her fierce mother holding their failing restaurant together by a thread, her pregnant sister whose life did not go where she wanted initially but who is still fighting for the future she wants, her cousin from India who is maybe in the mafia and is the comic stand out of this story, and her Aunt who has been climbing towards what she wants her life to be her whole life. Watching the way these people all interact together was truly the best part of this story. I would have read a book that was just this family.
The other really huge important part of this story is the community Hana is surrounded by. This neighborhood breathes in this story. It is a truly impressive show of how important world-building is to contemporary novels. Seeing the religious community through the Imam and his wife, the business community, the neighborhood. I just really really loved the community story being told. I would absolutely adore a story about literally anyone in this neighborhood. It feels so whole and vibrant and in the end, it is brought together so excellently.
I also really liked the thread through this book of Hana herself seeing her faults and trying to do better, and more importantly, Hana (and others in this story) requiring people who wronged her to do better in the future. I really loved the way forgiveness was important to this story, but forgiveness didn't require accepting less from people.
So, while there were aspects of this book I wanted more from, I also still really liked this book a lot. I will certainly be reading Ayesha At Last, Jalauddin's first book, and I am excited to see the movie being made!
I would absolutely recommend this book, I do think this would be a book that could be easily given to people who don't read romance because there is so much else going on in the book. I think that romance readers would also love this obviously, and if they are like me I think knowing right away what to expect will cut out the confusion factor I faced. I would especially recommend this to folks who love community and family stories.
