Hello friends, happy Wednesday! I hope you’re all having a good week. Today I’m going to be posting my review of Sandhya Menon’s novel When Dimple Met Rishi.

When Dimple Met Rishi by: Sandhya Menon: Dimple loves coding, it’s her whole world so when this great opportunity at Insomnia Con to create your own app comes up, she begs her parents if she can go. When they agree, she’s surprised yet joyful, until she finds out their ulterior motives… Rishi Patel, the boy they have chosen for her to get acquainted with for marriage will be there. Frustrated and annoyed with her parents for setting her up, she’s desperate to be rid of him. Although, the more time they spend together, the more Dimple realizes they have in common and that maybe he isn’t so bad. This novel was fast-paced and kinda cheesy. The main romance plot felt very predictable. The reader knew exactly how this was going to end, even though Menon kept throwing in these twists and turns throughout to throw us off, it wasn’t surprising to see how it ended. The STEM plotline was really what intrigued the reader, aside from the conflict that felt really clichéd and boring because it’s been so over used; it might have been better if the conflict was a little subtler, but the reader loved the STEM plot because it was fascinating and it was so fun to watch Dimple be so invested and love something so much. Menon’s characters were so well developed and enriched. The two main characters couldn’t be more opposite from each other. It was so interesting to see the two of them come together because they both came from very traditional Indian families, yet had such different viewpoints on how they saw their own futures. Dimple was all about wanting the best for herself and furthering her career, whereas Rishi was all about being the dutiful son and doing everything his parents wanted from him, even if that meant not doing the things he loved. The way the two of them came together helped each of them see a different side, a side neither of them hadn’t really thought about before meeting each other. They both were so strong-willed in their own beliefs that when they started to get to know each other, they could start to see the other’s perspective and it started to loosen the holds they had been so attached to. These characters felt so real and raw, just trying to find their way in the world. This novel really tried to balance the pressure that comes from wanting to be traditional and appeasing your parents to also wanting to be your own person and the reader thinks that Menon did a good job of that. Overall, this was an enjoyable read that really gave a voice to women in STEM and to Indian culture that we don’t see often in Western culture.