Tasha Ghouri is perhaps best known for appearing on perennial summer hit Love Island and it’s perhaps fitting that her debut novel, Hits Different, is a sunshine-soaked romp about romance, overcoming adversity, and achieving one’s dreams. It even shares a title with a Taylor Swift song to boot (although the novel is notably cheerier than the song).
Hits Different – co-authored with Lizzie Huxley-Jones, remarkable in her own right for queer romcoms like Make You Mine This Christmas and autism anthology Stim – follows Cassie, an immediately-likeable heroine who is dealing with a trifecta of issues, namely her indifferent beau, her soul-numbing job, and her stifled dreams of becoming a professional dancer. Opportunity soon knocks in the form of the chance to tour with a global popstar, catapulting Cassie into new territory and maybe the chance to seize the life she really wants.
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Hits Different is, if nothing else, innately warm and charming, with a cast of characters to root for, and a trope-filled premise that promises that the reader will know every twist and turn coming, for good and ill. This same sweetness permeates into the writing – one cannot speculate as to how much of the actual writing was split between the two co-authors – and even when things turn spicier (to use the #Booktok nomenclature), there’s still a welcome lightness of touch there. After all, this is a book pitched for the breezy summer holiday crowd – Hits Different, with its neon-hued cover and Ibiza setting is begging to be consumed on a hot beach with a cold drink at one’s elbow.
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Praise also should be given to the inclusivity shown in Hits Different – there’s plenty of LGBTQIA characters, some more prominent than others, including Cassie’s best friend Pen, and fellow dancers Sorrel and Katrina. Biggest of all, however, is Cassie herself, who is deaf and uses cochlear implants, making her if not unique then certainly a notable leading lady in romantic fiction.
Fortunately diversity in this area in the genre appears to be on the rise, whether that’s leads with limb differences (like Hannah Bonam-Young’s aptly-titled Out on a Limb) or neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism or ADHD (like in recent works from Talia Hibbert or Olivia Dade), making Cassie in Hits Different part of a pleasing wave of inclusion, rather than an outlier.
Is Hits Different the best romcom of the summer? Perhaps not – it plays things a little too predictable at times – but it is overflowing with charm and warmth, a sincerely enjoyable beach read that suggests that the partnership between Ghouri and Huxley-Jones may have a future in crafting more sweet, pleasant, diverse romances for the discerning reader out there.
Hits Different is out on 6th June from Hot Key Books.
