Hana Khan Carries On

 This book is described as a romcom, but it is a bit more than that.

It is about a young Muslim woman in Toronto.  Her father is an invalid as a result of a traffic accident, her mother is running a not very successful Halal restaurant. Hana works there part time but her dream is to get into radio.  She has a job as an Intern at a radio station.

In addition to this Hana has created a blog about her life and experiences.  She remains anonymous on the blog.  She has one follower with who she has developed a chat relationship.  They share their challenges with each other and give advice to each other.

Hana is devastated to find out that a fancy new Halal restaurant is going to open up in the neighbourhood and will likely put her mother's restaurant out of busines.  While this is going on Hana's pregnant sister who had also been helping out at the restaurant is told to take bed rest.  An aunt arrives from India and takes over Hana's room.  A male cousin also arrives to help out at the restaurant.

Hana meets the father and son who are opening the rival restaurant, they are very rude and cutthroat.  She decides to create online accounts and go on social media to spread negative rumours about the new restaurant. 

Hana feels her radio boss doesn't want to listen to her ideas and that she is being sabotaged by another intern so she quits her intern job.

As time goes by Hana finds she is attracted to the young man from the rival restaurant.  One day Hana's cousin convinces Hana to show him around Toronto and invites the young man from the rival restaurant to come along.  At one point they are verbally assaulted by some white supremacists, in the rucus Hana falls down.  Hana's cousin has filmed the incident and puts in on social media where it becomes widely watch with both supportive and not supportive comments.  Hana is very angry at her cousin for raising this situation online.

Hana and her cousin get busy trying to organize an annual neighbourhood street festival but they find their posters and some businesses get defaced.  Hana is very demoralized by this but they decide to work on.  On the day of the event there are some white supremacist protestors but also some counter protesters.  Once some musician arrives people in the neighbourhood decide to dance and ignore the protests.

A lot of other things happen in the book including that the young man of the rival restaurant gets to meet his mother.  He had been told by his mean father that she had died when the boy was young.  Hana and the young man marry.  Hana's cousin buys her mother's restaurant and updates it.  There is some interest in a podcast Hana has created about her aunt and it looks like she may get more opportunities in the broadcast field.

While there was a romance interest there was a lot more going on in this book with the neighbourhood politics, the racism, etc.  I liked the mix of story, podcast text and text messaging in the book.  It was a light but entertaining read.