Celebrating International Women's Day with First Comes Like

Happy International Women’s Day! This is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. It’s also a call to action for accelerating gender equality. And in support of your moms, sisters, daughters, girlfriends, friends and all the women in your life, you are encouraged to wear purple today.

In addition to celebrating this day, I participated in a International Women's Day book swap where the person I was paired up with gave me First Comes Like by Alisha Rai.

First Comes Like is the third book in the Modern Love series, which I am happy to say I snagged the first two from Book Outlet at a deep discount. (If you’re in Canada, use this link so that you can get $10 your first purchase from them!) Here’s what First Comes Like is about:

Beauty expert & influencer Jia Ahmed has her eye on the prize: conquering the internet today, the entire makeup industry tomorrow, and finally, finally proving herself to her big opinionated family. She has little time for love, and even less time for the men in her private messages—until the day a certain international superstar slides into her DMs, and she falls hard & fast.

There’s just one wrinkle: he has no idea who she is.

The son of a powerful Bollywood family, soap opera star Dev Dixit is used to drama, but a strange woman who accuses him of wooing her online, well, that’s a new one. As much as he’d like to focus on his Hollywood fresh start, he can’t get Jia out of his head. Especially once he starts to suspect who might have used his famous name to catfish her…

When paparazzi blast their private business into the public eye, Dev is happy to engage in some friendly fake dating to calm the gossips & to dazzle her family. But as the whole world swoons over their relationship, Jia can’t help but wonder: Can an online romance-turned-offline-fauxmance ever become love in real life?

And so, today is a nice reminder to us to always strive for equality andcall out gender bias and inequality. Let’s recognize and celebrate women’s achievements. And let’s especially empower one another.