The Startup Wife Review

Newlyweds Asha and Cyrus build an app that replaces religious rituals and soon find themselves running one of the most popular social media platforms in the world.

Meet Asha Ray.

Brilliant coder and possessor of a Pi tattoo, Asha is poised to revolutionize artificial intelligence when she is reunited with her high school crush, Cyrus Jones.

Cyrus inspires Asha to write a new algorithm. Before she knows it, she’s abandoned her PhD program, they’ve exchanged vows, and gone to work at an exclusive tech incubator called Utopia.

The platform creates a sensation, with millions of users seeking personalized rituals every day. Will Cyrus and Asha’s marriage survive the pressures of sudden fame, or will she become overshadowed by the man everyone is calling the new messiah?

In this gripping, blistering novel, award-winning author Tahmima Anam takes on faith and the future with a gimlet eye and a deft touch. Come for the radical vision of human connection, stay for the wickedly funny feminist look at startup culture and modern partnership. Can technology—with all its limits and possibilities—disrupt love?

General Impressions

I started this book both curious about the themes and afraid I would get lost in the tech-speak since I'm not the savviest person when it comes to business and technological advances. I had had it on my shelves for a while by the time Canongate's June Readalong was announced and that was what pushed me to give it a serious try and I ended up devouring it in two days.

This is one of those books that is so wonderful and able to hit right on target because the author lives and breathes these subjects and has first-hand knowledge of everything she is talking about from the cultural aspect of both her and Asha being Bengali women living in the western world to the intimate knowledge of what it takes to run a business, sitting on boards and working with their spouses.

I was particularly drawn in by two aspects of this book: its short length and chapters as well as the way the story was told that just kept me turning the pages and Asha herself. She was a woman raised by good people (I seriously loved her family so much), confident in her own genius and with the will and talent to change the world. At the same time, there was something so innocent and optimistic about her, in her belief in the world, her marriage, in the people that she had allowed into her life to have her back. As the book progresses we see how right and wrong she is: her family is awesome and always there, and other characters of colour, are sometimes there, but when she is in the lion's den, trying to build her business, she is often looked over, particularly by the men. The moment she is seen, she is discarded, as a woman, and even more easily as a brown woman, when there are two charismatic white men whose voice is wanted and accepted and hers is barely tolerated.

Asha knew what was going on, both at work and at home, but being in love, she allowed herself to be pushed aside and it took her a while until she was prepared to fight it. While she wasn't, there were women around her that knew what every unspoken word meant, and after she was, Asha lent that same strength and voice to others.

Conclusions

Seriously, read this book. Read it now. You will be as unable to forget Asha Ray as I was.

Thank you to Canongate for kindly gifting me a copy.

Rating: 4.5/5