I loved Worth Fighting For by Jesse. Q. Sutanto!

So far I've read 3 books from the Meant to Be series, and Worth Fighting For is my favorite one. I enjoyed the modern day setting of Mulan. She works at her father's (Zhou) hedge fund company and he's in the process of acquiring Wutai Gold. Wutai Gold is a family owned and operated business and has internal conflict amongst the stakeholders on how to proceed. Some of the family members are misogynistic and want their business to continue to reflect a man's man type of brand.

Zhou has a major health scare and needs to recover. Knowing that acquiring Wutai Gold was important to him, Mulan decides to take the helm and pretend to be Zhou and buy the company. Mulan and her cousin, Mushu, go to the Wutai Gold family ranch and manufacturing plant to learn more about the company. A big problem is that Zhou communicated to Shang and his family that he grew up on a farm and was a master in things like horseback riding and tending to farm life. I LAUGHED OUT LOUD several times reading Mulan dive in to these tasks that she doesn't really have a clue on what to do!

I absolutely adored her relationship with Shang.

Honestly the only thing I didn't like about Worth Fighting For was the constant reminders of the typical "finance bro life." I feel like with her being a leader at the company (and her dad as the owner!) that they're supposed to be the ones to reflect and influence the kind of work culture they want to have for their company.

Anyways, I really do love this book and so happy I got to read this as an ARC. Thank you, NetGalley, for giving me the opportunity to read this as an eARC! I can't wait for my preordered physical copy to arrive! :)

A modern day retelling of Mulan, part of the Meant to Be series.

As a romance centered around a woman trying to make it in a mans world - I enjoyed this quite a bit! Mushu definitely gives an Awkwafina vibe that I loved, and Mulan and Shang are very sweet together. The aunties cracked me up, and Auntie Jiayi is one amazing woman.

But when I think of it as a Disney’s Mulan retelling, it falls short. Sure, Mulan sorta pretends to be someone different - but barely. It didn’t feel as major to me as Mulan pretending to be a man, and the lie actually grew tiresome after a while because it was so silly and did she not think there might be ramifications if they went through with the contract under false pretenses? There was a character named Mushu and I loved her, but Mushu the dragon had to help Mulan to show his own worth - Mushu here just helped Mulan for the fun of it. So with those two things, maybe I just don’t feel like the stakes were high enough - though I understand it would be difficult to write a contemporary romance with stakes similar to actual Mulans. But on top of that, there weren’t as many nods (that I noticed anyway) as there have been in other Meant to Be books and I think that was the most disappointing.

So I would give this 3.75 stars overall. I think based on just how it is as a romance, aside from getting annoyed with the lying because she really should have realized sooner how unrealistic she was being, it would be a 4 stars overall. But for my own expectations when it comes to “Disney’s Mulan Retelling” I have to dock a quarter of Star.

I would still recommend it, and I loved the authors note talking about how much this meant to her! I also tear up at that moment in the Disney film and appreciate her own ties to the story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hyperion Avenue for this digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

thank you to netgalley and hyperion avenue for this arc in exchange for an honest review.

DNF @ 5%, just couldn’t finish it because I am in a reading slump.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this early review copy.


I had such HIGH expectations for this book! I have loved (LOVED) every other book I've read by Sutanto. It seems I've loved each new book more than the last. And I loved the live action Mulan adaptation. So I thought "contemporary novel adaptation of Mulan by one of my new favorite authors, Jesse Sutanto" would be a match made in heaven. Alas. It was not.

Hua Mulan is the VP of her father's private equity firm, Eighty-Eight Capital, and she's no nepo-baby, she graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, she's the first into the office and the last to leave, she has worked HARD to get where she is. Her cousin, Mushu, is an assistant at the same firm. The problem here is that Sutanto has probably never worked at a private equity firm. I haven't either, but I'm pretty sure the dialogue in this book is NOT how they talk. The characters all sounded like little kids <i>pretending</i> to be finance bros.

Li Shang is a hottie who is also the CEO of his family's whiskey distillery, Wutai Gold, and he's trying to sell the family company to Eighty-Eight Capital in the hopes that it will revitalize the business and expand the market. Shang is a fine character and I enjoyed him, but the meet-cute misunderstanding was awkward and silly, and the insta-lust Mulan feels for him is annoying.

Part of my problem is that apparently I have fundamental issues with dishonesty in romance novels. I have no issues with a woman pretending to be a man because she must join the army to protect her father, but I do take issue with a woman constantly lying and bragging just to impress the Lis and convince them to sell their family company to her father's equity firm. I also find it ridiculous that any supposedly intelligent person would think she'd be able to nail ranch life by reading a few wikipedia pages or watching a TikTok, when she's never even touched a cow before. It's not funny. It's the opposite of intelligent. It's stupid. It's insulting, in fact, to the people who are actually well-educated in ranching - does Mulan think any old rancher could walk in and take over her finance job? No? Then why would she be able to do this?

And I got really tired of Mulan constantly thinking about and complaining about and mentioning sexism. I'm an engineer, believe me, I know what it's like to be literally the only woman in the room. Do I talk about it all the time? Am I constantly bitter? No. Because it's a basic fact of life, something I knew I'd have to deal with when I went into the field. I just ... deal. I get it, Sutanto is making a point for the readers. But my goodness, no need to beat us over the head with it.

Sutanto does a great job throwing in dozens of Easter eggs for her readers and for Mulan fans, so well done there. She's clearly a long time fan and is writing this one from her heart. This book didn't work for me, but I hope it works for lots of other readers.

3.5 stars rounded up and my thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for the eARC.

I got so very close to DNFing around 20%, mainly because Mulan and Mushu were a little insufferable as characters. The Not-Like-Other-Girlsification of Mulan was a little rough to try to get past. Around the 50% mark, the characters finally solidified and got a little better.

Hua Mulan is on the partner track at her father's hedge fund company(?), but when her father has a heart attack the morning before meeting with a potential acquisition, she decides to use her father's name to gain the respect of this very masculine whiskey brand. Something like that? Honestly, the plot vaguely follows the Disney movie, but with some obvious changes here and there. Mushu plays the sassy best friend still, obviously. Shang is (also obviously) incredibly gorgeous and shuns traditional gender roles, to the derision of his male uncles and cousins.

I really love that Mulan and Shang bonded over their shared experience of being children of Chinese immigrants and how the expectations, family pressure, and heteronormative gender role stress hit both of them. I liked that we got to see them connect on something deeper than "hey, you're really hot."

Mulan is great at her job in finance working for her father. She doesn’t agree with his desire to acquire a whiskey company, but decides to be open minded in the meeting. Unfortunately, her father falls ill and winds up the hospital. While Mulan is used to dealing with sexist finance bros, the sexism in the family whisky business is beyond. Since she will be taking the meeting, Mulan decides she must pretend to be her father and let the family think they have been emailing with her the entire time.

I love the Meant To Be collection, and love that some of my favorite authors are taking part! I mean Jesse Sutanto re-writing Mulan? What could be better? The sexism in this family was so insanely infuriating I wanted to jump through the page and fight them myself! Mulan did such a wonderful job of fighting back and sticking up for herself though, I just loved her. For some reason in this one that fact that her name was Mulan really stuck out and threw me while reading, and I don’t really know why. The other books all have main characters with similar or exact same names, but this one the name took me out of the story a bit. Besides that small detail, I enjoyed this one so much!

Thank you to @hyperionavebooks for my gifted copy of this book!

I was really excited to dive into Worth Fighting For, especially with the promise of a modern-day Mulan retelling — one of my favorite Disney stories. I love a strong, intelligent female lead, and the premise sounded like it had a lot of potential.

Unfortunately, I had to put this one down around the 20% mark. There was simply too much going on in the beginning, making it hard for me to get grounded in the story or connect with the characters. The writing style didn’t quite work for me, and I found myself struggling to stay engaged. Also, I have to be honest — if I had to read the term “finance bro” one more time, I might have screamed.

That said, I can see how this book might resonate with readers who enjoy chaotic, fast-paced contemporary stories with a strong concept at the center. It just didn’t land for me personally.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this title.

It makes me so sad to say, but I did not like this. I have loved every other book in this series, and I was really looking forward to this one. But this just really missed the mark for me. Mulan was not a strong/bad ass women like in the movie. She felt very weak. This book reads like a YA book. This author is very much or miss for me (more of a miss since I have only really liked one of her books). I also found the writing style of this book very repetitive. I am a huge Disney girl also and this really didn't give me the classic Disney vibes I was looking for. This might be my biggest letdown of the year. I was fully expecting to love this.

Thank you so much, Hyperion Avenue for the ARC of this book. This comes out on June 3.

I had high hopes for this one as I have loved the other books in this series of retellings but unfortunately it just didn’t hit the mark for me. I had a hard time connecting with the characters and the retelling aspect just didn’t seem very focal.

I want to start by saying that although I DNF'd this, I did enjoy the Chinese representation throughout the book. It does a good job at displaying the culture, at least to an outsider (as I am), and I enjoyed reading about it. Now, to my issues with it. I stopped reading sometime through the halfway point, mostly because of the self-insisting feminist commentary and not-so-great retelling of Mulan. The dialogue, and sometimes internal monologue, felt very Gen-Z occasionally and dulled what were otherwise good points about the workplace patriarchy. Additionally, the audience is supposed to believe that Mulan, the main character, is much smarter than most of the egotistical men in finance, yet the book does more telling than showing. The showing it does do is marred by distractingly poor explanations of private equity firms and what they do. There was definitely potential, I just think I wasn't the target audience for this and expected a retelling more true to the original story.

⭐️⭐️.5 - This retelling was entertaining and it made me laugh quite a few times. For that reason, I’m giving the book 2.5 stars. But almost everything else was a miss for me. I had to try and suspend much disbelief and common sense to push through and enjoy this story, so it was a very touch and go reading experience.

In this retelling, we have Mulan as the VP of her father’s private equity firm. After her father suffered a heart attack and had to be hospitalized, Mulan stepped in to take his place in the acquisition negotiation of a family-owned whiskey company named Wutai Gold. Mulan used her father’s name and claimed she’s been the one communicating with the board members of Wutai Gold, since apparently they’re all very traditional (aka sexist) and wouldn’t want to deal with a woman. To keep up with her lies, Mulan even ended up getting roped into a trip out to the Li’s ranch for a few days to prove she was manly enough to run the company.

For a VP of a private equity firm to undergo negotiations with another entity under false pretenses the way Mulan did, was extremely absurd and obviously very unethical. I feel like in real life, there would be legal repercussions with that type of deceit. Mulan was supposed to be very ambitious and smart, having graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, but she just came off as really dumb with the stupid lies she told and the way she let it all snowballed out of her control.

It’s wrong to build any type of relationships upon a foundation of deceit, so I just couldn’t vibe with this Mulan retelling. in the original story it was honorable and brave for Mulan to take her dad’s place in the war to save his life, in this modern day retelling it just felt slimy and so unnecessary for Mulan to lie about her identity. I wasn’t sold on it.

Additional cons:
- Insta love. Mulan was simping after Shang from the moment she laid eyes on him.
- The frequency of which the term ‘finance bros’ was used.
- Shang was a hottie that loved to cook and clean, but he was too perfect to the point of being bland.
- We’re constantly hit over the head about the misogyny of the finance world.

Pros:
- Mushu! She was a riot, and honestly would’ve been a more interesting FMC.
- The Li’s complex family dynamic.
- The delicious food! The descriptions got me craving every dishes!

Even though this story was a miss, as I loved Sutanto’s “Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers”, I am still keen to check out future works by this author.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-ARC.

A modern-day retelling of Mulan, where Mulan pretends to be her father in order to secure a deal for her father’s finance company. The job? Acquiring a family-owned whisky company. A company, however, that is led by a traditional Chinese family who do NOT believe a woman’s role is in business. Does Mulan have what it takes to bring honor to her father and acquire this business by being “manly” enough to impress Shang and his family?

This was just the cutest story. I loved the romance between Mulan and Shang (it was definitely instant attraction), and the Mushu character was perfection. As Mulan’s cousin, she was witty and insightful, and a great pairing to Mulan’s reserved and dutiful actions. While reading, I imagined Mushu as Awkwafina. 😂

The overall message of the story really resonated with me - we are all wearing various masks as we navigate our day to day interactions, but who is the real me? How can I be true to myself? I enjoyed Mulan’s journey to find her true self and be confident with who she is. This one is definitely my favorite in the Meant to Be series.

Thank you to Hyperion Avenue and NetGalley for early access to this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was genuinely excited to dive into Worth Fighting For. The concept of reimagining Mulan in a contemporary setting, navigating the corporate world, and tackling gender expectations had so much potential. However, as I progressed through the book, I found myself struggling to connect with the story and its characters.

The premise—Mulan stepping into her father's role in a high-stakes business deal—felt forced and lacked the emotional depth I was hoping for. The romance between Mulan and Shang developed rapidly, leaning heavily on insta-love, which made it challenging to invest in their relationship. Additionally, the humor often felt out of place, and the narrative relied on clichéd tropes that didn't resonate with me.

While I appreciate Sutanto's attempt to tackle themes of identity and empowerment, the execution fell short. The story lacked the nuance and authenticity that could have made this retelling impactful.

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to preview this book.
I liked how Mushu was portrayed as a cousin for Mulan.. This was a realistic retelling of the traditional Mulan story with a lot more auntie involvement.

I loved the writing and the story—it was my favorite in the series. I loved how it kept with the whole Mulan theme and stayed true to yourself. 4.5 stars

I am a huge Disney fan, so this series is definitely for me. This book was a retelling of sorts of Mulan. While I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I thought the previous one was a little better and enjoyed it more.
If you like romance and Disney this book and series is for you.
I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

The next installment of the Meant to Be series. This time it’s Mulan! This is romance, but it’s Disney romance y’all so don’t be expecting anything more risqué than kissing. You also really see the humor Sutanto brings to her ‘Dial A for Aunties’ books!

This was such a cute installment to the Meant to Be series. For those unaware, this series includes contemporary reimaginings of everyone’s favorite Disney stories.

I was especially excited for this one because Mulan was always my favorite Disney movie growing up. I loved the “girl power” even at a young age. This book doubles down on the girl power, btw.

Jesse Sutano definitely delivers on this one. This book was filled with her signature humor. I found myself laughing often at Mulan’s inner dialogue. And instead of heading off to war, Mulan is fighting every day in the world of finance bros and having to prove herself and her competence to the Li family as they try to sell their business. I really loved the way Sutano reimagined this story.

Also, this retelling does have a Mushu! And the character is excellent.

I highly recommend this one if you’re looking for a quick, fun read. It releases on June 3, 2025. A giant thank you NetGalley and Hyperion Books for a free eARC in exchange for my honest review.

This was a quick and fun read! I'd read By the Book from the series before and when I found out there was a Mulan retelling, I had to read it!

I think Jesse Q. Sutanto did a great job recontextualizing the story of Mulan. Her being a woman in a male dominated industry and the way in which she has to pretend to be "the man" to protect her father was really smart.

That being said, I couldn't really connect with Sutanto's writing style in this book. The book was a little heavy-handed on the references and given its short length, the pacing didn't help much with character development or creating a convincing romance between the two main characters.

Thank you to Netgalley and Hyperion Avenue for the opportunity to read this book in advance of its publishing date!

The animated Mulan is one of my all-time favorite Disney movies, so I was so excited to get this ARC. And let tell you - this did Mulan justice!! I loved the parallels between this and the classic Mulan. Mulan pretending to be her dad to get things done? Classic. The characters were great, the storytelling was wonderful, the authors writing was perfect. I highly recommend!

Thank you to the publisher for this arc in exchange for an honest review :)