I read When Dimple Met Rishi

This week's novel is When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon.  This was a Goodread's Reader's Choice Awards nominee and on NPR's list of best books of 2017.

Dimple and Rishi are first generation Indian-Americans.  While Rishi embraces Indian culture and his parents' vision for his future (including marrying a nice Indian girl that they pick out for him), Dimple is more Americanized and pushes back against her parents.  She really doesn't like her mother's misogyny, especially when it comes to agreeing the let her go to Stanford, not because it has a great computer science program, but because it's full of nice Indian engineers for her to marry.  Dimple is very excited when her parents agree to let her go to the exclusive, intensive app programing summer camp of her dreams, but it turns out it was all a big set up for her to meet Rishi.  Rishi assumed her parents would have told her about the whole arranged marriage thing that their parents had set up, but he's wrong.  There's a lot of awkwardness to deal with.

I liked how this book showed that there are different ways to be a first generation America.  It's not a universal experience, even if their parents are from the same culture.  But I also liked how at the same time it showed that Dimple and Rishi have similarities.  The neatest part of the book for me was when Rishi offers her some khatta meetha, and she's like "Those are my favorite snacks!" and eats whole handfuls of them right after having a conversation about how much she hates her parents pushing Indian culture on her.  It's pretty charming.

But along the same lines, there's a moment I did not like at all.  There's another Indian-American kid at the camp, whose name is Hari and pronounces it Harry.  And Dimple tells him that he's wrong and his name is Hari.

...Excuse me?

I think he knows how to pronounce his own name.  However he chooses to pronounce it is his choice, and it is not okay to be rude to anyone about their name of choice.  If he uses an Anglicized version, that is part of his personal journey and his personal relationship to the culture in which he lives and the culture his parents are from, and that journey is none of her business.  She can say, "My parents would pronounce that Hari," or "In India, that's pronounced Hari."  And it's irritating, because this not only is this coming from Dimple, who for the most part (as I said) would rather not with being Indian, so this defensiveness of "true Indianness" is weird.  It's annoying because one of the big themes of the book is policing who's Indian enough.  And it's also annoying because Hari is a pretty awful dude for a slew of legitimate reasons, but his "mispronouncing his own name to look cool" is presented like it's supposed to be further evidence against him being a good person.  It's presented like the reader's supposed to say, "Geeze!  What a tool!"  But there's enough evidence already that shows that he sucks, and making me think instead that the main character sucks and giving me a moment to sympathize with him doesn't help the story.

***

Next week:  A Conjuring of Light, the last book of the Shades of Magic series by V.E. Schwab.