Author: Tanuja Desai Hidier
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WARTY!
I can see why Scholastic wouldn't want a reviewer like me reviewing a novel like this, but guess what? They can't stop me, they can only delay me! Now I've had a chance to look at it, I can tell you it's awful. This novel may be a better fit for you. All I can tell you is that it gave me fits.
Hidier declares in this tale that the only thing any young women, no matter what her cultural heritage, can have on her mind, is the desperate need to find a guy to make her complete. Like a women without a guy is pretty much useless: incomplete at best, and not even worth writing about at worst. How insulting can you get? Read this if you want to find out. Why do so many female authors insult women like this? More frighteningly: why do so many young women support novels like this? Do they honestly swallow the crap that's spewed from these stories, or are they simply so desperate that they'll literally read anything that even pretends to tell a decent tale?
Other than that the main character (Dimple) is stupid and clueless, the first thing you'll notice is that the gray-scale photograph at the beginning, which is, supposedly, Dimple, is not her at all - unless we've been lied to about Dimple's physical condition. Dimple is presented to us in this novel as being either somewhat overweight or as they put it, a 'large boned' girl, and relatively short at five feet or so, by American standards. That's a plus (pun intended), but it's wasted. Instead of running with a promising start like that - a start that's different from the vast bulk of YA novels, the author trips and face-plants repeatedly, starting with a photograph in the front which bears no resemblance to the girl in the story.
Rather than accept her physique and deal, Dimple lies even to herself, trying on (or rather, trying to try on) ridiculously under-sized clothes when she gets to shop with her mother for her seventeenth birthday. These idiots ignore and insult the girl who works at the store, who doesn't exactly own the most winning of personalities, but who does honestly try to advise the pair of them as to a realistic choice of sizes for Dimple.
Here's a quirk that makes you wonder where the editor was: The author doesn't use quotes! She uses neither doubles as is in fashion in the USA where she has lived, nor singles as in the UK where the author now lives. Instead she uses em dashes! Weird. This novel has more em dash per m² than any novel ever published. The em dashes are at the start of the speech, never at the end, and it can be confusing when the speech itself contains an em dash. I never use em myself...but cute tricks like that can't cut a dash in a novel which is, at its very foundation, appallingly demeaning to women.
I read this because I love Indians. I grew up in England feeling that Indians. Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis were almost cousins, but instead of getting an interesting and engrossing story of mixed cultures, I got nothing more than a lousy, trite, predictable YA romance with an em dash of curry powder, which the author has tried to pass off as a four course meal at a fine India restaurant. She failed.
