"Hani and Ishu's guide to Fake Dating" is a heartwarming love story between two South Asian girls living in Ireland by the author Adiba Jaigirdar. 

Humaira Khanshes, called "Hani", is an easygoing and popular girl at her school. However, as she comes out to her closest friends, Aisling and Dee, as bisexual, they invalidate her sexual identity since she has not dated a girl yet. Because how would she know? Maybe she's only "figuring" it out. In Hani's panic, she blurts out that she is indeed seeing a girl right now, and her name is Ishita "Ishu" Dey, who her friends despise. In contrast to Hani, Ishu is quite academic driven and hopes to get into a great uni to impress her parents. Ishu helps Hani out in hopes that she'll become the next Head Girl.

Although they only date for a mutually beneficial pact, they start to develop feelings for one another. But like most relationships, it starts to get messy, and some people even try to stop the two from archiving their happily ever after. 

Overall I immensely enjoyed this book, and I adore Jaigirdar writing style since it is easy to read. However, since this book is a slow burn, it does have some flaws. I felt like the middle was a bit dragged out just because of the sake of more pages. I'm usually a fan of slow-burn books, but this book did not need some of those pages. 

Nevertheless, after finishing the first half of the book, I could not put the novel down. It was lovely to read about Hani's and Ish's relationship while also discussing heavy topics like toxic friendships and even islamophobia which made the story more real to me, and I guess since many people do go through these things. I picked up how realistic the microaggressions were against the main characters and how others phrased their prejudices. Especially Hani's friends always lack understanding of Hani's identity as a Muslim, Bengali, and bisexual.

Whilst I'm white and straight, I will not speak on the South Asian nor bisexual representation in this fiction. After reading other reviews and looking at their ratings, I can say that this book did almost only get positive feedback on these topics.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to read an adorable story about two girls finding love for one another and who's a fan of the "one bed" and "fake dating" trope.