Our unnamed narrator is a post-doc struggling to find even adjunct-level jobs in the cutthroat world of academia. When she’s told that she’s not getting a single course in the fall, her best friend Adam – a marketer by day and poet by night – suggests she just try marrying rich. It’s a joke, but our narrator takes it seriously. She sets herself the task of going on 100 dates over the course of the summer, with the goal being a proposal (or at least a serious relationship with someone rich) by fall. She spends the summer going on dates, taking notes, and avoiding applying for academic jobs outside of the greater Los Angeles area. It’s all going as well as can be expected when a family medical emergency calls her back to Tehran. Now she has to deal with her complicated relationships with her father and her mother – divorced in all but name but legally still married – while navigating daily life in Iran. While in Tehran she also evaluates her dating journey, and starts to realize that maybe the answer was under her nose all along.
So Liquid is pitched as a love story, a high-brow romcom with feminist themes, but for me it fell flat. Our narrator is pretty much a jerk. She and looks down on everyone around her. She feels entitled to a tenure-track job in her very specific field, and doesn’t deign to apply for other jobs in academia despite being in dire straits, employment-wise. She doesn’t seem to like her mother or her father, yet craves their approval and love. I liked her better in the second half of the book, where she’s dealing with her family, complicated grief, and grappling with her place in her father’s homeland. But she still ghosts people and acts like she belongs in Tehran more than the people who actually live there.
I will say that the writing is funny; her unit ideas for her hypothetical course are witty, and the middle section of the book contains a spreadsheet with humorous notes on all the dates and what she liked about each one. But there’s no real love story there. When the inevitable happens, it only feels inevitable because it’s hinted at in the blurb. There’s very little build-up to her realization, and we’re often told but not shown her friendship with Adam. I don’t regret reading it or anything, but I don’t know that I’d recommend it to anyone else. My overall reaction was “Meh”.