Makeup is fine if you’re Celia, her roommate, but it’s not Dimple’s thing and that’s totally ok. I loved this book for its portrayal of a teenager being comfortable enough in who she is and what she loves to refuse to play the stupid games. More female and male feminist role models in YA books. Even Rishi-who wants nothing more than to marry Dimple and live the happy life he has seen in his parents is a feminist and supports Dimple without constraining her. Dimple isn’t strident but she also isn’t going to take your bullshit. Dimple is a feminist and damn proud of it. Menon goes further and generally defies stereotypes of the conservative Indian community, without minimizing or losing the power of the family. Silicon Valley does horribly by women-more needs to be written (fiction and non-fiction) about women kicking ass and taking names in this field. I love that Dimple’s passion is technology and coding and love that Menon created an idol/mentor for her in Jenny Lindt (a fictional, successful app developer). She lives, eats, and breathes web coding and app development and damned if anything or anyone is going to stand in her way.

Dimple wants nothing to do with boys, clothes, or makeup. (There probably are some but I think we can agree not enough given their statistical representation in the population.) I loved that Dimple defies old stereotypes of the demure Indian girl. While I’m by no stretch of the imagination a connoisseur of YA books, I can’t easily name any others with two Indian-American characters who feature prominently.

Representation matters and Sandhya Menon knocks it out of the park with When Dimple Met Rishi. As the novel comes to a head, Dimple has to choose between following her passion for coding and web development and a growing passion for Rishi….or does she? Rishi is also going to Insomnia Con…to meet Dimple, the girl their parents have arranged to be his wife (a fact about which Dimple is completely unaware). Of all the things she’d jeopardize if she called Ritu auntie a backward, anti-feminist blight on democratic society…ĭimple just needs to get out of the house, with her mother constantly foisting eyeliner and dreams of the IIH (Ideal Indian Husband) on her, to InsomniaCon., a six week coding conference where the winning final project gets to work with Dimple’s idol, Jenny Lindt, to develop and market an app. …Ritu auntie only waved her off, as if she thought Dimple were being demure-who on earth went to college with anything but the aspiration of landing a marriageable partner? Dimple thought of Insomnia Con., of Jenny Lindt, of SFSU, of Stanford.

When dimple met rishi book review