When Dimple Met Rishi (Review)

TITLE: When Dimple Met Rishi

AUTHOR: Sandhya Menon

RATING: 5*
GENRE: Young Adult

Summary: Dimple Shah lives under the strict rule of her parents, with her mother's voice mostly winning out in arguments. All she wants to do is attend Stanford after a summer camp where she can develop an app and possibly meet her idol, Jenny Lindt. Rishi Patel is a traditional Indian son. He follows his parents ideals and agrees to go to the same summer camp, just to meet the girl his parents have set him up with for a potential future marriage. But when they initially crash and then find happiness amidst the camp where they find a similar goal, they also find themselves.

"This is our life. We get to decide the rules. We get to say what goes and what stays, what matters and what doesn't." What matters to Dimple is her life and her own choices. That's all she ever wants: her own choice. Where her parents want her to find the Ideal Indian Husband in college, Dimple wants to go to learn web development and follow her dreams, not just go for romance. She's not even interested in that aspect of her future. At the start of the story, these dreams are met with great resistance. But eventually, they relent and allow her to go. The reader thinks that they've finally realised their daughter's dreams.

"That's what you think I should be relagating my brain space to?... Like, if I don't make the effort to look beautiful, my entire existence is nullified? Nothing else matters--not my intellect, not my personality... my hopes and dreams mean nothing if I'm not wearing eyeliner?" What made me pick up this book was the culture I knew I'd find in it. I'd not long read The Sun is Also a Star which made me aware of how much diversity in culture is needed in young adult books. So when I saw When Dimple Met Rishi, I needed that sort of exposure. What Sandhya Menon does is something uncommon. Not only does she write about Indian culture in her book but she strays against tradition with her female protagonist. Dimple is quirky, short-tempered and not afraid to stand up for herself when she meets Rishi. She's not afraid to be different or herself. She's strong and won't adhere to the image other people want her to be, even those who don't even know her.

"She refused to be one of those girls who gave up on everything they'd been planning simply because a boy entered the picture." Dimple and Rishi meet before Insomnia Con even officially starts. Due to one poor joke about their future, Rishi immediately destroys any hope of any sort of attachment and gets a shower in Dimple's coffee. For most, this was the moment they fell in love with Dimple. For me, it was when she stood up against her mum in the first few pages; it was finding out she had a love for web development. As someone who had a mum who wanted me to wear a bit more makeup a couple of years ago, I sympathised with Dimple for her reasons of not wanting to. She didn't want to impress boys; she just wanted to live her life for herself. She didn't want every choice she made to be for boys or an ideal romance. She just wanted her own life and ambitions. Her mother didn't understand the concept of looking a certain way for yourself.

"I feel like I need to speak out, because if no one speaks out, if no one says 'this is me, this is what I believe in, and this is why I'm different, and this is why it's okay', then what's the point?" The moment I fell in love with Rishi was when he took her to the store with the buddha statue; he'd already scoped places out. He'd already followed his love for his culture to find a place he'd feel at home. Rishi is a boy who seems to consider everything and everyone. He's so unabashed in his background when other people try to make him feel ashamed for it.

"If you always look like you're going to bite them, beti, no boys are ever going to want to talk to you." Throughout the book, Indian terms are specified. They made me pick up my phone and search for them to get a better understanding of what Dimple wore, makeup terms, food, and researched to understand the family terms used. This really opened my eyes to something that is seriously missing from most young adult books. Readers of young adult are diverse as well and they need that ability to relate. Not everything is about rich, straight, white people. And the ones that are in this book are typical, which I actually liked. Celia, Dimple's camp roommate, is bisexual and black, and she has her own character development. Everything central is this book is on diverse characters and that's what makes it so important.

"But that was Rishi... He was like a pop song you thought you couldn't stand, but found yourself humming it in the shower anyway." The other importance of this novel is the development of endurance Dimple experiences towards Rishi, from wanting him to go home immediately, to finally feeling for him. Without meaning to, I think Dimple fell in love with him, despite how they clashed at the start. The ambition in her found the smothered ambition in him with his art. Rishi buried the fact that he lived his art in order to be the son his parents wanted and needed. He was willing to follow an future he'd not even chosen before Dimple showed him how much he couldn't just keep art as his hobby with how much it lived in him. There's a really beautiful scene at a party where Rishi goes up against another artist and Dimple finally sees why he can't have his art as a hobby. The description is something so incredibly stunning that I closed the book for a few minutes, just to live in it before moving on.

"He wondered if he should feel a stab of jealousy... but all he felt was this warm, almost gooey feeling in his chest." Ashish, Rishi's brother, is also a character who gets great development. He goes from being the annoying younger brother with no responsibilities to the reason that Dimple and Rishi win the talent competition within the camp, something fun before the winning app gets decided. He practices with them, and through that, Celia and he get their own sub-story, in which he stands up massively for her against the rich, white boys. He becomes more level-headed with Rishi with the problems start happening and the final argument against going after his heart.

"She'd say this for him: he had no guile." What I adored about this book was that passion is never sought out by themselves in the end. Both Dimple and Rishi go behind each other's backs to prove to their respective idols how amazing their work is. That causes so many problems but it was something I loved. It was something relatable, especially Rishi's. When he meets his idol, he loses the nerve to show him his artwork. He plays it off because he can't handle the weight of the possibility. Ambition and the future is important in this story, something I've thoroughly enjoyed reading in relation to such incredibly-written characters.

When Dimple Met Rishi is truly a gift, so much that I wrote this messy book review for it in an attempt to convey my love for it. Sandhya Menon has started something beautiful and I can't wait for anything more she writes to follow her style with.