First Comes Like

Score: 3.5/5 Bookmarks

Steam Rating: 🍆/5

Thank you to Avon for gifting me a review copy of First Comes Like by Alisha Rai. This is book number three in the Modern Love series, and I absolutely adored the first two books The Right Swipe and Girl Gone Viral.

Jia Ahmed is a successful beauty and fashion vlogger and influencer, living in LA. Her family (mostly doctors) don’t understand or respect her chosen career, but she’s working her tail off trying to create a life and independence for herself anyway. She doesn’t have time for a relationship, but when a Bollywood superstar slides into her DMs she’s intrigued, and they get to chatting.

Dev Dixit has some serious family drama of his own, but he’s come to the USA for a role, and is trying to find independence of his own and support himself and his tween niece, who he looks after since his brother died.

Jia realizes Dev is in town and decides it’s time to take their relationship from texting to meeting in-person, so she surprises him at a cast party. The problem is, he has no idea who she is. It turns out she’s been catfished, but by who?

Even though Jia is hurt and angry, she agrees to meet Dev and talk through what’s happened. But when paparazzi blast photos of them all over the internet, Jia’s family is outraged that she’s seen with him. Things escalate from there, and the two of them agree to pretend they are dating.

Usually, fake dating is one of my favorite tropes, and because the first two books in this series were so great, this was one of my most anticipated reads of 2021. Unfortunately, I don’t feel it lived up to the other two books.

I was left with more questions than answers, and I just didn’t feel the chemistry or buy the relationship between the two main characters. It was neither an arranged marriage or a love match, so why the rush for them both? And while I really liked both characters I felt that even by the end of the book we knew facts about each of them and their pasts, but we didn’t really know either of them. I think I needed more build-up, tension and scenes where they got to know each other—there wasn’t enough of that for me to believe their connection.

Without giving any spoilers, there was so much mystery and build-up about the catfishing scheme at the beginning of the book but then it was sort of explained away in a fashion that didn’t make sense to me, or feel like a satisfactory reason for it.

Also, the author’s other two books are quite steamy and this was completely clean (they didn’t even hold hands) up until the end. I think it should either have been clean, or at least closed-door, or had more intimate (even if not steamy) moments throughout the book but it felt quite jarring to be clean all the way to the end and then BAM, sex scene.

I did still enjoy the book, I just didn’t feel it was up to the same standard as the first two books. If you’d like to grab a copy for yourself, click the button below.

Synopsis:

Beauty expert and influencer Jia Ahmed has her eye on the prize: conquering the internet today, the entire makeup industry tomorrow, and finally, finally proving herself to her big opinionated family. She has little time for love, and even less time for the men in her private messages—until the day a certain international superstar slides into her DMs, and she falls hard and fast.

There’s just one wrinkle: he has no idea who she is.

The son of a powerful Bollywood family, soap opera star Dev Dixit is used to drama, but a strange woman who accuses him of wooing her online, well, that’s a new one. As much as he’d like to focus on his Hollywood fresh start, he can’t get Jia out of his head. Especially once he starts to suspect who might have used his famous name to catfish her…

When paparazzi blast their private business into the public eye, Dev is happy to engage in some friendly fake dating to calm the gossips and to dazzle her family. But as the whole world swoons over their relationship, Jia can’t help but wonder: Can an online romance-turned-offline-fauxmance ever become love in real life?