When Dimple Met Rishi - Sandhya Menon

When Dimple Met Rishi was one of my most-anticipated reads for Fall 2017.  It seemed like it had so many things going for it: main characters who aren't white (diversity matters), a young woman in a STEM field (Dimple has a passion for coding), and a romance plot with an arranged marriage--or rather, a hopefully arranged engagement, since Dimple isn't actually aware of the fact that her parents are trying to hook her up with an Ideal Indian Husband, though she knows her mother wants her to get married.  Unfortunately, I felt like this book ultimately fell short of my expectations.

The story follows the two title characters as they attend Insomnia Con, a six-week app-coding bootcamp, the summer before they enter their freshman years of college.  Dimple dreams of being a coder.  It is her passion, and attending Insomnia Con and winning the app-coding competition for a chance to work with her idol seems like a coup that she won from her reserved parents, especially considering the thousand-dollar fee that she knows is a stretch for her family to afford.  Rishi, on the other hand, is resigned to being an engineer like his CEO father, though his true passion is drawing comic art.  He attends Insomnia Con mainly to get to know Dimple, as his parents and Dimple's parents know each other and think the two would be an ideal match.  Unfortunately, Dimple has not been made aware of this, and their first encounter ends with her throwing an iced coffee at him and fleeing the crazy guy who apparently thinks she's going to marry him.

Unfortunately, this didn't end up being a story of "getting know you while building world-changing app."  Despite their rocky first encounter and Dimple's determination to not get attached to anyone, Dimple and Rishi fall in love with each other pretty much right away, and only the barest minimums of the actual Insomnia Con competition are mentioned.  Instead of working on their app, Dimple and Rishi appear to spend most of their time swanning about San Francisco, eating out (can't blame them on that one) and practicing for a bizarrely-inserted talent show in which they perform a Bollywood dance.  No wonder the competition comes to the end it does--though of course, we're supposed to see that clearly they are the rightful winners!  (Why?)  The two have chemistry, but it was disappointing to have the conception that Dimple basically just ditched her app programming.  I don't think we're supposed to think this, but there's about three sentences of Dimple working on it in the book, so it really doesn't feel like she's as focused as we're supposed to believe she is.  And Rishi doesn't seem to know anything about coding, so it's hard to see how he got into Insomnia Con at all!

Watching the characters struggle against the expectations and preconceptions of their families was interesting, I'm not convinced that it was enough to propel the entirety of the story because ultimately, it doesn't end up being much of a struggle.  The parents cave pretty easily into wanting their children to be happy as soon as the children actually, explicitly push back.  So not much drama there, despite the "big deal" the characters make it out to be.  It ended up being a story that overall lacked dimension, with things seeming to come to the characters very easily on all fronts with only about five minutes of suspense in wondering if things will work out happily.  I think there were a lot of good concepts and themes in here, but none of them were worked to the degree they could have been, and should have been if this was to be a truly great book.

3 stars out of 5; I enjoyed reading it, but I'm not sure I would go for it again.