A review by spearly
Make Up Break Up by Lily Menon

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
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 -
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).
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