Ayesha at Last is a retelling the story of Pride and Prejudice featuring the titular Ayesha, a Muslim woman in her late twenties who has put aside her dreams of poetry and just finished a career change to become a teacher, financed by her wealthy uncle who has been financially supportive of her family since her father’s death including moving them to Canada and giving them the house they share with her grandparents. She is single and being passed on the proverbial marriage mart by her younger cousin. Her counterpart is Khalid, a conservative man working in tech who is extremely devout and loyal to his mother following the death of his father the year before. He knows he wants to be married and is planning to accept whomever his mother chooses for him, until his chance meetings with Ayesha create feelings he didn’t know he could have for someone he wasn’t married to.
What I thought Jalaluddin did extremely well was bounce between multiple characters, this isn’t just a dual POV. It is also a loose retelling, with the author picking the major character types needed to convey the kind of plot of misunderstandings that P&P enshrines while updating it to showcase another community. I was unsure about this book when I got started for one important reason – the baddies were a smidge too cartoonishly bad. I did something I don’t usually do and flipped to the halfway point and the end and read a couple pages at each location to get a feel for what i was getting into and decided that I was on board with the pacing of the arcs and the final denouement of this romance and could continue on, it didn’t hurt that I really liked Ayesha and Khalid and was interested to see them get over their respective pride and prejudices.
Bingo Square: Bollywood
Blackout! 
