Hello all. Sorry for the slight delay since my last post. The end of the semester hit, and with it came not only finals but yet another awful cold. I’m on the mend now, and one final is finished, so it’s back to business as usual. Mostly. I still have two exams and a project to finish up before this weekend, so if I drop off the face of the Earth again for a bit that’s why.
Last week, I read When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon. It took me a bit to get my thoughts together on this one, because I am so conflicted.
When Dimple Met Rishi follows Dimple and Rishi the summer before they go off to college. Both are the children of Indian immigrants to America. Dimple is pretty rebellious. She is totally uninterested in her parents’ traditions, styles, and desires. She just got into Stanford, and all she cares about is coding. She is certainly not interested in snagging an ideal Indian husband. Rishi is pretty much the exact opposite. He is pretty traditional, and he follows his parents’ wishes even when they conflict with his own. He takes being the eldest son of the family very seriously. At the start of the novel, Dimpble and Rishi have never met. But their parents are old friends, and they’re hoping to set up an arranged marriage between Dimple and Rishi. Dimple wants to go to this pre-college coding program for the summer, and to her surprise, her parents let her go. When she gets there, she meets Rishi, who is like “hi future wife,” because he knows what’s going on, and Dimple is like “WHAT?!” And that’s the start of the book.
Full disclosure, I picked this book up after watching a negative review on YouTube and thinking, “This book sounds cool. What is this person talking about?”
So I really, really wanted to like this book. I mean it’s about an Indian-American girl who loves coding and is designing her own app. Like how cool is that? Throw in parents trying and failing to arrange her marriage and this was just set up for a lot of fun. And I did like the first half of the book a lot. It was a lot of fun and so much cute. Dimple and Rishi are made partners for this summer program to design their app, because of course they are. So they have to work together, and they become nerdy friends, and they’re designing their app and having fun and facing down bullies at the summer program. And then Dimple starts falling for Rishi—Rishi fell for her a long time ago—but she’s honest about not wanting a serious relationship because she wants to focus on her coding career, and Rishi listens to her. So they go on a really cute not-date. And I’m still okay with this.
But after this point things fell apart for me, much to my chagrin. For one thing, we lost the cool coding stuff and app design part of the summer program. Everything became focused on them trying to win this talent show which, admittedly, would give them additional money to design their app, but Bollywood dancing has nothing to do with coding. And okay this is a small quibble, but around the halfway point of the book we really do lose the coding stuff, and this book could be happening at any pre-college program. Second, for someone who insists over and over and over again that she doesn’t want to be one of those girls who gives up everything she wants for a guy, well she kind of does just that. And okay she’s not totally okay with it, but she does it. And for a guy who is so great at sticking up for himself and for Dimple when it comes to the other kids in the program, Rishi lets Dimple bulldoze over him all the time. Which brings me to my next concern about consent. I don’t want to go into details, but there’s a scene, and if the gender roles were reversed in that scene, everybody would be shouting about consent.
I admit that these are all relatively small quibbles, and for me, the book could have been saved by a strong ending. I don’t want to give spoilers, but the ending was way too neat for me. My vaguest possible description is everybody gets what they want and realizes the other one was right and they all live happily ever after. Honestly, the way things were going in the book, I wanted an ending where everything blew up in their faces at the end of the summer program, they broke up, and they walked away having learned something about themselves. This would have been a good ending and made all my other problems with the book totally acceptable, if not strong plot points. But this is not the ending, and the ending that was… it just solved all the problems too neatly and made everything too okay for me.
One last thing I’ll say is that I saw a few book reviews on YouTube expressing that this book was inaccurate to the experience of growing up in the United States as the child of Indian immigrants. The author grew up in India herself, so this isn’t really an #OwnVoices story. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up the child of Indian immigrants in the United States—that’s not part of my own life experience or any research I’ve done—so I’m not going to chime in on that particular commentary about this book. If it’s true, though, I find it troubling.
All in all, as much as I loved the first half of this book, and as much as I wanted to love the second half of this book, it just didn’t work for me. I will say that my perusal of Goodreads reviews shows that a lot of people absolutely adore this book, and a lot of people hate it. I fall somewhere in the middle. It could have been so great, but for me, it just wasn’t. It wasn’t absolutely terrible, but it did have some serious problems, and overall the biggest reason it didn’t work for me is the ending.
If you haven’t read When Dimple Met Rishi, I hope my review is helpful for you to decide if you want to read it. Do keep in mind that opinions are widely spread on this one, so my opinion is certainly not the end-all-be-all on whether this is a good book (actually my opinion is never the end-all-be-all. That’s what opinion means). But since opinions are so divided on this one, I’m also really curious what others who have read this think. Do you agree with my opinion? Do you think I’m totally crazy? Let’s chat in the comments.