My Week in Book Review: When Dimple Met Rishi and This Is Where It Ends

When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

Dimple Shah has it all figured out. With graduation behind her, she’s more than ready for a break from her family, from Mamma’s inexplicable obsession with her finding the “Ideal Indian Husband.” Ugh. Dimple knows they must respect her principles on some level, though. If they truly believed she needed a husband right now, they wouldn’t have paid for her to attend a summer program for aspiring web developers…right? Rishi Patel is a hopeless romantic. So when his parents tell him that his future wife will be attending the same summer program as him—wherein he’ll have to woo her—he’s totally on board. Because as silly as it sounds to most people in his life, Rishi wants to be arranged, believes in the power of tradition, stability, and being a part of something much bigger than himself. The Shahs and Patels didn’t mean to start turning the wheels on this “suggested arrangement” so early in their children’s lives, but when they noticed them both gravitating toward the same summer program, they figured, Why not? Dimple and Rishi may think they have each other figured out. But when opposites clash, love works hard to prove itself in the most unexpected ways.

I . . . love this book. This was a reread for me, but even the first time I picked it up and saw the title written in Sharpie on a coffee cup and the main character biting her straw, I knew this was going to be the kind of sassy, adorable romance I couldn’t put down, and at no point did it disappoint.

Let’s start with Dimple. She’s impatient with the world and everyone in it who doesn’t see things like she does. She’s got a chip on her shoulder as big as China. She’s pretty out and out mean to Rishi when he shows up just because he represents the life of oppression she’s always felt her parents wished on her, even though Rishi himself is very nice.

Where Dimple gets away with that is her passion—she cares SO much about what she does that it bleeds out of this book’s pores. Her coding, her desire to help her father with her app—you get it, and therefore you get her. It also doesn’t hurt that we see up close and personal how much her mom wants to control her life, and if you’ve ever experienced that with an authority figure in any measure, Dimple’s experiences have you screaming, “Would you just leave her alone?”

Rishi, on the other hand, is the perfect guy to fall in love with. While I’m not saying I want an arranged marriage like Rishi does, he’s charming, sweet, thoughtful, patient, [insert every other drool-worthy boy descriptor here]. Where Rishi saves himself from being flat is his art and his fear. He’s afraid to go after what he really wants and has an all or nothing mindset in regards to his duties to his family and tradition. They’re very understandable fears and work well with his character.

This book is a romp through falling in love and finding yourself against a palette of activities that seem boss to write about: an app coding competition and photo scavenger hunt to Little Comic Con and a talent show. There are strong secondary characters and subplots with Rishi’s relationship with his little brother and Dimple’s concern over her roommate trying to get in with the bratty, rich kids. This book is set in the summer right before college, so it can be classified as YA but still get some of that fun feel of independent college life.

This book is five stars for me. Read it. Love it. That’s all.

This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp

10:00 a.m. The principal of Opportunity, Alabama's high school finishes her speech, welcoming the entire student body to a new semester and encouraging them to excel and achieve.

10:02 a.m. The students get up to leave the auditorium for their next class.

10:03 The auditorium doors won't open.

10:05 Someone starts shooting.

Told from four perspectives over the span of 54 harrowing minutes, terror reigns as one student's calculated revenge turns into the ultimate game of survival.

Woo. This is a book you had better be prepared to read, because it’s sad and hard and shocking all rolled into one. Heavy is probably the best word to describe it.

If someone asked me if I liked this book, I’d say no. Not because it’s not well written or doesn’t have good themes, but because it’s hard to like a book about something as tragic and horrifying as a school shooting. I read it as fast as I could because I wanted to get through all the sad stuff and move on to something happier. Ironically, I think that how hard it is to read books like this is exactly why we should read them: they force us to confront hard realities that we’d rather not think about. A school shooting at some other school is sad, but it usually doesn’t affect your daily life that much. This Is Where It Ends brings you into the lives of four people whose entire lives change because of the 54 minutes of this school shooting, and you wonder with them if anything will be the same again.

I’ll be vague about the details of what happens since the mystery of the whos, whats, and whys is what tugs the story along. However, what I will say is the story doesn’t pull any punches. No one is protected by story armor. The shooter shoots fast and often. Death mars the pages of this story in different ways and at different stages, and the further you get into it, the more you realize the extent of what the shooter has done and will do. This is not a satisfying story. While there’s some hope at the end, there’s a lot more hurt, and you get the idea that it will take a long time to heal (and maybe never will completely). Commentary on the sad nature of life? Possible. My take is that the author didn’t want to prescribe what would help each person heal—she wanted to let us see ourselves in their brokenness and find our own ways to go on.

I’d say my only particular beef with this story is that the chapters were interspersed with texts, blogs, and tweets from non–point-of-view characters. I get that the idea was to show the effects of the shooting on more than just the four main characters and that it simulates real life and what teens in that situation would have been doing, but I found it hard to follow, which made me not care about the people tweeting, texting, and blogging. I never entirely figured out who some of them were. It’s possible that I would have gotten that better if I hadn’t read the book so fast, but I’m not going to apologize for that. It wasn’t a book I wanted to linger over. If I ever did a book club discussion on this book, that would be the time to linger. Otherwise, with all the kids stuck in that school auditorium, I just wanted to get out.