The Letters We Keep

Nisha Sharma is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. I’ve read two of her books—Dating Dr. Dil and Tastes Like Shakkar, the first two in her If Shakespeare Was an Auntie trilogy—and have many more on my TBR. Her latest release is her first New Adult romance: The Letters We Keep, about two rival college students who team up to unravel a decades-old campus mystery.

Special thanks to Skyscape and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book!

Summary

Jessie Ahuja has just started her freshman year at college, and she’s already made a bit of an enemy in Ravi Kumar, the billionaire nepo baby in his senior year. But after they start fighting over a particular study room in the library, Jessie comes across long-hidden letters from two ill-fated lovers who apparently died in a fire in the 1970s. Jessie and Ravi decide to team up to track down who these students were and what really happened to them. But in the process of unraveling this mystery, Ravi and Jessie may also find their own love story unfolding…

Review

It’s been a while since I read a novel for a younger audience, in this case, a New Adult romance. But even so, The Letters We Keep is instantly captivating, with characters that feel real and both a love story and a mystery keeping the pages turning. Jessie Ahuja has just started her first year of college, and I could relate to her in several ways: She comes from a working class background, she’s wholly focused on her classes, and she’s working part-time to afford being a full-time student. She is completely unlike Ravi Kumar, a college senior and billionaire nepo baby. He’s never needed to worry about money or his career prospects… but he is at odds with his controlling dad, who insists Ravi follow in his footsteps, ignoring his own passion for creative writing.

Jessie and Ravi start off as rivals, not only due to their different backgrounds and Jessie’s resulting prejudice against Ravi, but also because they both want to use the same study room at the library. Jessie isn’t the only one who cares about her grades! She’s inadvertently stolen the study room Ravi’s been using the past few years, and neither one is willing to give it up. This sets off a weeks-long battle for the room, which also leads them to stumble across a decades-old campus mystery. When they find the secret letters of two students who may have died in a fire back in the 1970s, Jessie and Ravi overcome their differences and team up to unravel this unsolved mystery.

The Letters We Keep is interspersed with short letters that one of the missing students wrote to her forbidden college boyfriend. She was Indian and he was white, and they could never be together, despite their love for each other. As Jessie and Ravi work through the letters and track down anyone who could know what happened, they get to spend a lot of time together. Playing detective opens up the opportunity for their own unlikely love story to unfold.

I enjoyed seeing two people—so opposite in some ways but so similar in others—get close to each other through this shared project. It’s a rapidly unfolding campus romance, but Jessie still has her reservations, largely due to their different financial backgrounds. As someone who’s also felt the impact of money constraints my whole life, I appreciated the discussions Jessie and Ravi have about wildly disparate socioeconomic standings, career prospects, and family support. Would them being together ever work out, or are they just too different? Would his family ever approve of her, or would they tear them apart?

Final Thoughts

The Letters We Keep is a fast-paced and thoughtful novel about star-crossed lovers kept apart by race or socioeconomic standings, solving a decades-old mystery, and forging your own path no matter the odds against you. I enjoyed both the romance and mystery aspects of it, and am pleased with my first foray into Nisha Sharma’s non-adult novels.

I’ll definitely be reading everything I can from her! I can hardly wait to read Marriage & Masti, the final book in her If Shakespeare Was an Auntie trilogy. After that, I’ll need to decide whether to dive into her Singh Family series or her Young Adult fiction first…

Get the Book

You can buy The Letters We Keep here – it’s available as a hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

The Letters We Keep by Nisha Sharma
Audience	New Adult
Genre	Romance
Setting	New Jersey
Number of Pages	223
Format I Read	Ebook (NetGalley ARC)
Original Publication Date	May 1, 2024
Publisher	Skyscape

Official Summary

Two students―worlds apart―unite to solve the mystery of a legendary decades-old love story gone tragically wrong in a captivating romance by the award-winning author of The Karma Map and Dating Dr. Dil.

It doesn’t take long for ambitious freshman and aspiring engineer Jessie Ahuja to learn about two university legends. One is the haunted history of Davidson Tower, where more than fifty years ago, two ill-fated lovers disappeared in a devastating fire. The other is Ravi Kumar, a privileged billionaire nepo baby who’s aggravatingly charming and occupying more brain space than Jessie has room for. Things change when a campus prank locks them both in the old tower’s ghostly library.

There, Jessie finds letters from the fabled lost lovers, forgotten in a hollowed-out copy of Persuasion. One by one, the letters suck Jessie and Ravi into a beguiling mystery and an achingly beautiful long-ago romance destined to go up in flames. It’s also drawing Jessie and Ravi―every bit as star-crossed―closer together. Can they overcome whatever fate has in store for them? Or are they just as doomed as the young lovers whose tragic end has become legend?