Review: "Sorry for the Inconvenience" by Farah Naz Rishi

Sorry for the Inconvenience by Farah Naz Rishi
Published July 2024 via Mindy's Book Studio
★★★★

It's a YA novel come to life, sort of: in Sorry for the Inconvenience, Rishi weaves a story of cultural expectations, family dysfunction, and grief...with an unexpected love story underpinning it all.

I'm not usually one much for trigger warnings, but if you like to know what you're in for here I do recommend checking out those warnings ahead of time. The cheerful cover belies the more harrowing parts of the story here (though kudos to the cover designer for the dogwood flowers); without going into too much detail here, there are layers and layers of loss. But also: throughout the story, the thread of Stephen, Rishi's best friend from college, who proves a steadying force again and again throughout the book...and who, when things were extra tough, offered Rishi yet another measure of security: a marriage of convenience, one that could stay a platonic partnership between friends—for as long as Rishi wanted.

I waffled a bit on my rating. There were some quite odd proofreading misses that took me out of the book; this would usually be normal (and not worth mentioning) for an ARC, but in this case the ARC was offered after the publication date, and I'd expect published books to have been through proofreading. But the story and its telling are gripping, and the way Rishi's background as a YA fiction writer comes through here is pretty fascinating. This isn't written for a YA audience, but if someone described the events of this book—with a few tweaks—and said that they were going to write a YA novel about those events, I'd say "Yup, that tracks." (Here I should maybe note that YA done right can tackle some wickedly heavy subjects.) It certainly doesn't make the harder material of the book easier to read, let alone live through, but it does make for a fast-paced, complex read with (what do you know) as classic a hero as one could hope for in a contemporary YA book. And as it happens, Rishi fictionalized at least part of her story with Stephen for a novel, and now I'm desperately curious to see how that version of the story goes.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.