Behind-the-Scenes of Writing My First Long-Form Book Review
Spoiler alert: it didn't end up actually being a book review 😔

This post refers to The Key to Understanding Adult Siblings: Your In-Laws, a hybrid book review/personal essay written by me and published by The Walrus on July 4th, 2025.
At the start of the pandemic, I randomly began uploading short book reviews on my Instagram Story, and was really happy to see that the 100, 150 word blurbs resonated with many people. I started adding the Stories into a highlight, one for each year; in 2022, I took screenshots of these Stories and uploaded a monthly carousel of reviews on the feed. I continued to do this until halfway through 2024, when I just stopped posting. I was at the two-year mark of a decline in my personal engagement with social media that started when I first moved to Paris, and today looks like me going on Instagram once or so a week, on my laptop, to look through the Reels sent by good friends that are waiting in my inbox.
But writing the reviews was always incredibly rewarding, and I missed doing them. So in March I took up the torch again, and now write a monthly post on my Substack with what I call bite-sized book reviews, the same length and format as I had done for Instagram:
Just as I was starting this new strategy, I was commissioned to write my first long-form book review — a dream come true for any bookworm. But there was one little problem.
I didn’t really like the book.
The commission was from The Walrus with Samia Madwar as my editor, a combination that has previously led to the publication of my proudest work as a writer: a personal essay on intergenerational immigrant relationships using the framework (pun intended) of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, and a feature on an innovative sex education program out of Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic. And so it was with a sense of security that I approached Samia with my awkward question: How do you write a review about a book you didn’t enjoy reading without feeling like an asshole?
Obviously, a review can be negative or positive or neutral, as long as it is authentic to the opinions of the reviewer. And though I am certainly no Dorothy Parker (whose writing, as it were, I love), I’ve certainly had harsh words for books, including blatantly telling people not to bother reading a few real duds. But it’s one thing to give a poor assessment in a 150-word mini review, but I was asked to write a 1500- to 1800-word piece. It felt excessive to spend the entire word count tearing down a work, especially the debut novel of a writer whose short fiction I have enjoyed.
Enter the personal essay, an amorphous style of narrative non-fiction writing that was incredibly popular in the 2010s and is, I believe, having a recent resurgence, thanks in part to websites like Medium and Substack. With the generous assistance of Samia and her editorial team, I was able to take a compelling (I hope) look at adult sibling relationships by musing on my own connections to my brother and my sister-in-law.
My essay kicks off with text messages from my aunt and a phone call by me. I was inspired by the following passage from the novel I was asked to read, Iryn Tushabe’s debut novel Everything is Fine Here:
“You called her, didn’t you?”
“Her phone is switched off,” Mama said. “I called and called.”
“Can I borrow your phone?”
…She dialled Achen’s number from memory.
In this scene, desperate to reach her sister during a family emergency, Aine, the protagonist, uses her mother’s phone to call Achen, her sister’s girlfriend — which is what I did, too: the aforementioned phone call was to my brother Ornab’s partner Natasha. In my case though, I wasn’t worried about not being able to reach my sibling in a literal sense; I was nervous that he wasn’t in a good way, that I wouldn’t be able to reach him in an emotional sense:
And so I called the woman I call my sister-in-law that January evening, her afternoon, because though I have known my brother his whole life, she knows him best. She doesn’t need a biweekly FaceTime update to know the depth of Ornab’s depression, how it festers, how it fades. And for that, I am so grateful.
I mention this in the article, but I will expand on it here: Natasha isn’t legally my sister-in-law, because she and my brother never officially married. But I call her my in-law, and I call her family my in-laws, too: I introduce her mother as my mother-in-law, her brother as my brother-in-law, etc. This confuses some people, and it frustrates others. To me, it makes a lot of sense. Latchkey kids of divorce, only two years apart in age, I think of Ornab and I as a bit of a set. We held each other through a complicated childhood, stumbled one after the other into becoming adults; though our lives are no longer as intertwined, we are who we are, where we are, because once upon a time, we were in it together. It’s a two-for-one deal: love one Momin, get another one for free.
Now, I haven’t quite been able to return the favour, with a steady set of in-laws that I can offer to Ornab, a reality I looked at a little differently after reading Tushabe’s book:
You can’t really know someone nearly thirty years and not have friction. But we were lopsided in a specific way that I am only now, after reading Tushabe’s novel, considering: for the near decade my brother and my sister-in-law have been together, I have been single. The dissolution of my long-term union and [Ornab and Natasha’s] adorable train meeting happened in the same summer. I got Natasha; Ornab got no one.
NB: For anyone reading the “near decade…I have been single” line and gasping or having sympathy pains, please, don’t worry! I’ve still like, held hands and stuff!
It’s an interesting task, to write about someone else’s writing. So too is it to write about yourself — another reason I found it difficult to criticize Tushabe’s novel. Everything is Fine Here is clearly autobiographical, drawn on real experiences she has had in her home and with her family. Much like what I am writing. This point didn’t make it to the published piece, either, but I must credit Tushabe for doing what is asked of any author: to write from a place of knowing — even if, as it where, it emerges as a long reflection, on a book review, that is actually a personal essay.
You can access my reflective book review essay in its entirety for free in The Walrus (excellent Canadian journalism, no paywalls). There are no comments on their site, so feel free to leave a thought here if you wish.
Just want to shout out that I LOVED your monthly recaps. As an avid book-reader who also takes out many books from the Toronto Public Library - I would borrow & read a lot of your recommendations!
I can’t wait for more. Personal essays and the BTS 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽