Everyone was reading it. So I decided to read it. It didn't pan out well for The Help, but it was perfectly fine for Girl on the Train. But When Dimple Met Rishi?
For those unaware, When Dimple Met Rishi is a YA novel about an 18-year-old Indian-American girl named Dimple who's just graduated, is going to Stanford in the fall, and really wants to go to a summer coding program called Insomnia Con so she can create an app, meet her idol and BEGIN HER LIFE OF CODING.
I was super on board at this point.
She also has an overbearing mother who she thinks wants to see her married and with a family immediately. Dimple never wears makeup, is very open about her opinions, has wild hair (the book keeps coming back to these points), and is very anti-the marriage thing. What she does NOT know is her parents are letting her go to Insomnia Con because they have set her up with Rishi, the son of their friends. Rishi knows this, though, and boy, do hijinks ensue.
HERE IS MY MAIN PROBLEM WITH THIS BOOK:
If you're an author and you want to write a book, great. If you're a diverse voice, A+, fantastic, we need more of you. But don't sell your book as a diverse YA novel about a girl in a STEM field when you spend maybe 10 pages of your 378 page book actually talking about STEM-related things.
Or, as I complained to Jesse Doogan, fellow Book Rioter:
The vast majority of the book is either Dimple going on dates with Rishi to quirky but also meaningful locales in his new BMW (oh right, he's of course also ridiculously wealthy and also finds her unbelievably beautiful) OR preparing for a talent show (????) that this summer coding program puts on every year? What? And the winning team gets $1,000 to put towards developing their app? Did they start out with a certain amount they were allowed to use? Can they not use their own money? I would assume not, but who knows, certainly not the book.
The amount of time the book spends talking about Bollywood, coupled with the fact that the author's bio on the back (which is four sentences long) mentions Bollywood twice and "bad dance moves" once, makes me wish this book had abandoned its STEM pretense and just been a cute YA romance about two Indian-Americans who meet at Bollywood dance camp.
Write what you know, and don't try to bluff your way through what you don't. It'll show.
I'm kinda glad you didn't like this because I started listening to the audiobook and I was like "I don't think I like this book" and then I felt bad. I also get overly annoyed when people are praised for not taking care of themselves for the of The Work and INSOMNIA Con made me think that there wasn't going to be much encouragement of life-work balance and SLEEP IS IMPORTANT.
ReplyDeleteI WISH they had talked about them not having a work/life balance and just staying up all night working on their app, but instead Rishi's thinking about "how soft her lips were" as they prepare to go on a date to a quiet but tasteful bar where he has the waiter present her with a beautiful edition of one of her favorite books.
DeleteIT IS GARBAGE I HATE IT
Ahahaha, I had huge reservations about the talent show. What? How do you hire people to help you with your app you're supposed to be coding yourself? Why are they spending all their time making out instead of coding? What does a talent show have to do with ANYTHING?
ReplyDeleteFurther questions: how does a guy who is not an engineer in his soul get into MIT with the intention of doing CS? There is no way that should have happened. Also MIT has humanities too, I bet you can go to MIT and major in art, who gives up MIT to go to SF STATE? Why is this fancy event at SF State and not Berkeley? (Because SF locations? Why do some of them have cars??)
SF State.
I liked a lot of it anyway.
Ahaha I'm sorry you didn't like this (not cos I did like it, I haven't read but boo to spending time on a book you don't like) BUT this was entertaining.
ReplyDelete