The Bookish Mindset

Overview:

Title: Four Eids and a Funeral
Author: Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and Adiba Jaigirdar
Published: 2024
Genre: YA Romance
Themes: Coming of age, religion

One sentence summary: Said and Tiwa meet again at a town funeral after not speaking in years, but is it enough to rekindle what they had?

One sentence review: This is how teenage romance should be written, it was brilliant.

Review:

Sometimes I’ll read a YA and genuinely want to ask the author if they actually remember being a teenager because it just feels so.. off! But Àbíké-Íyímídé and Jaigirdar have absolutely smashed it! It’s the all-in emotions, the absolute belief things HAVE to happen and the glorious pettiness. This is teenagers through and through and I loved it.

The story was cleverly crafted between the two already YA author legends, each writing a separate POV. Both Said and Tiwa are characters with their own lives and issues, they’re whole characters on their own and I was rooting for them both.

In terms of the romance we have friends to sworn enemies to reluctantly working together to remembering why they were friends and realising their feelings.. and it’s a journey I’m glad to go on. (If you liked Hibbert’s Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute, you’ll enjoy this too). I think it’s a trope pattern that would be easy to do wrong but these two excel at.

It’s definitely one I recommend so let me know if you plan to pick it up.

If reading more is something that you’re looking at doing this year then should check my reading challenge out here! Read nine books from nine prompts over the first six months of the year and be entered into a draw to win a bundle of bookish goodies.

If you’d like to get yourself a copy, you can support local bookshops while doing so on Bookshop.org with this link here.

If you like what you’ve read and would like to access more content, I’d love if you could take a look at my patreon and consider supporting my content on there too.

And don’t forget to check out my other blogs and reviews – you can find books with similar themes in the same folder link below, or click back onto blogs to see the whole offering.

Last updated 20/01/2025