This book was so cute! Took me just one day to read it.

My rating: 3/5

When Dimple Met Rishi is about a girl called Dimple, who doesn’t support or understand her family’s traditions and doesn’t see marriage as a priority for herself. She wants to become a coder, and she gets an opportunity to attend a coding contest and meet her idol. There, she meets Rishi, a romantic, a firm believer in tradition. A dreamer of star-crossed love and marriage. Their worlds collide so that they might discover that all their beliefs about what world was limited to in possibility weren't true after all.

Positive thoughts:
· Good-boy love interest.
· Romantic love interest
· Great writing. I found it quotable and concise, allowing me to really fly through this book.
· Fast-paced
· Feisty main character.
· Some Indian traditions, culture and some basics learned about Hinduism.
· Super cute and slightly steamy romance. I was rooting for the main characters and cared about their connection.
· Very easy to get into

Negative thoughts:
· Supporting characters weren’t GREAT. I found them to be rather flat and forgettable.
· A bit of insta-love.
· Typical rich mean kids. No villains I loved to hate, rather they were just…there. They weren’t charismatic enough to come off as truly evil and arrogant.
· Switching POVs were a bit annoying at times.
· A bit repetitive. The main characters kept repeating what their goals and beliefs were. I think it was supposed to feel like reassurance, but it was a bit too much.

· Too much foreign language without translation. Sometimes I understood from the context, but sometimes I was just oblivious. And trust me, I tried.
Overall, I recommend this book but it was more of an airplane read for me. It was good, but I wasn’t obsessed with it. It’s a fresh story with diverse characters, and it was intriguing to read about their traditions and culture and how they are different from other contemporaries!

Thanks,

Yomna

"She nodded and smiled. "Works for me." And Rishi, gods help him, thought, I could look at that smile every day and never get tired of it"

* * * .5
3.5 / 5

When Dimple Met Rishi is a romance, pure and simple. Dimple and Rishi are both going to a summer program for aspiring coders and app developers, but for different reasons. Dimple wants to code, to build towards her future career. Rishi wants to go and meet his future wife, Dimple; their parents have been arranging their courtship for years. This book is funny and sweet and excellently diverse, but it also has pacing issues and I found the romance stifling at points.

Dimple and Rishi are excellently developed characters. Dimple is struggling with her mother, who is sending her to college in the hopes of meeting the "ideal Indian husband", whilst Dimple wants to show her mother she has worthy beyond her beauty and desires to work on her career. She's lively and passionate, but also struggles with bullies and her heritage. She's very much a modern young woman. Rishi is very traditional. He's a gentleman who is committed to helping his family and upholding traditions, but he's also an adorable dork who loves drawing comics.

"When he looked back up at Dimple, it hit her how much this really meant to him. This wasn't just an arranged marriage to Rishi; this was the rich fabric of history, stretched through time and space"

The romance was, I thought, quite predictable. But it also developed really quite naturally and I was absolutely loving this book for the first half, but then the romance got a bit too unrealistically passionate (declaring love after having known each other for about three weeks, for example) and I lost my enthusiasm for it. What I did love was how diverse the people were, Rishi and Dimple are American Indian whilst Celia, Dimple's roommate is part Dominican, and how the book has great feminist undertones.

One problem I had with this is that it is almost entirely romance. Whilst this is a romance book, I expected it to have a reasonable amount of time devoted to coding. There isn't. Dimple's idea for a web app is spoken about briefly, but I'm not sure that we ever see either of them write a single line of code. Whilst there are loads of delightful cultural details that really flesh out and substantiate Dimple and Rishi as American-Indian characters, there's not a lot that really cements them as coders. Either the author doesn't know anything at all about coding, or she just thought it was a bit irrelevant, which I thought was such a shame.

It's also a summer school setting, but no one ever seems to have any workshops or lectures or tutoring. It's just Rishi and Dimple sitting around in each other's rooms chatting. All the details that would give this novel something beyond the romance are lost. On that note, when Rishi's brother showed up, I thought he would be a great opportunity to develop some kind of family bonds on page. Whilst some of this does happen and it's really great to read, Ashish ends up getting entangled in a romance of his own.

"My mom doesn't know why I want to do anything besides get married to the Ideal Indian Husband and settle down. She thinks college is basically just this big mating ritual"

The writing, on the other hand, is fantastic. What I really loved is that Menon weaved details in and explicit references to Indian culture (clothing, food, language) that are easily understandable. Whilst talk between, say Dimple and her mother, is not translated, the context is used masterfully to make meaning obvious. This book is such a love letter to American-Indians, to those caught between traditions and expectations of family and modern America. It's also quite funny. I did find that the pacing was a bit off - whilst I was viciously flipping pages at the start, around the middle I found the plot really stagnated.

The bottom line is: this book is almost entirely romance, so if that's what you read, then you'll love this book. Even those not all that interest in romance will find something to enjoy in this delightful book.

Hi,

Really enjoyed this one! The perfect YA summer read, will definitely be recommending when it comes out in July! Full review in the link below.

Livi