Book of the Week: When Dimple Met Rishi

When Dimple Met Rishi

by Sandhya Menon
Published by SimonPulse, 2017
380 pages pages
ISBN: 978-1-4814-7868-7
Age 12 and older

Teenage Dimple Shah loves coding and wants to be an app designer. She’s not interested in having a boyfriend, let alone thinking about getting married, something her traditional Indian parents can’t understand. Rishi Patel embraces traditional Indian values, respects his parents and their opinions, and wants to make them happy. When Dimple and Rishi’s parents decide that the two would be a good match, Rishi embraces the idea—he likes everything he’s learned about Dimple—and agrees to attend the same summer app development program for high school students that Dimple is going to. He’s unaware Dimple knows nothing about the informal arrangements their parents have made for their lives after college. It’s the perfect setup for this romantic comedy with a Bollywood flair (sans singing—although they do dance!) when Dimple, angry and appalled by what Rishi tells her when they meet, finds herself thrown together on a project at the camp and they (inevitably) fall in love. This delightful novel told in third-person chapters alternating between them is more than just fun and romance, although it offers plenty of both. As a young woman of color, Dimple navigates sexism and racism during her time at tech camp while also being keenly aware that most campers, including Rishi, are from wealthy families, while Dimple has little money to spend or spare. ©2017 Cooperative Children’s Book Center