In Mutual Discord, the protagonist Sophia Mendoza unfairly loses her marketing job when her colleague steals her pitch and turns to content creation, building a series called “Matildas” that celebrates women whose contributions have been erased, appropriated, or overshadowed by men. Then she finds herself drawn to Alex, an internet friend, who also turns out to be her best friend’s boyfriend. Their relationship unfolds alongside Alex’s attempts to reconnect with his Puerto Rican heritage, with Sophia and her family becoming part of that journey. Over the course of the book, we find Sophia and Alex strike up a compelling rapport, peppered with compatibility, banter and heat, with the looming knowledge that their proximity is a betrayal towards her best friend.
What makes Mutual Discord particularly commendable is its willingness to venture into a kind of moral grey area so rarely seen in genre romance. Sophia is deeply invested in feminism and in exposing the ways women have been wronged, yet she is also capable of making a deeply anti-feminist choice herself. The book doesn’t treat this contradiction as a simple case of hypocrisy; instead, it asks what feminism actually looks like when the person who believes in its principles is forced to confront her own capacity to violate them. There are no perfect feminists, after all. At its most interesting, Mutual Discord examines the distance between belief theory and its practice.
The romance has everything you’d root for: banter, chemistry, respect… and then there’s a gigantic ethical conflict that can also put you in a unique kind of unease. Assumptions build into increasingly dubious circumstances, and because the central conflict takes so long to resolve, the unease rarely gets a chance to recede. By the time the resolution arrives, much of the book has already been spent sitting with that discomfort. The author has accomplished a rare feat here: she’s created a book worthy of book club discussions, while also giving the readers much to swoon over.
Read via: ARC received from publisher via NetGalley