From Twinkle, With Love by Sandhya Menon

   Twinkle Mehra always wanted to be a director, to bring to life the stories she has inside of her. However, Twinkle is part of what she calls “The Groundlings”, the invisible, geeky people of her high school, and she feels she’s never seen, that her voice doesn’t have any weight, and she’s stuck dreaming about a better, shinier Twinkle, that’s heard and loved by her long time crush, Neil Roy.

  Twinkle’s life takes a turn when she starts directing a movie with Neil’s twin brother, Sahil, and starts receiving secret-admirer e-mails from a mysterious “N.”. She’s now stuck between two boys, with her social reputation climbing fast, and she has to make decisions about who she really wants to become.

 

My Review:

   If you want to read a very positive,chirpy review about this book…look elsewhere. I wasn’t a fan, at all, and I’m gonna dissect some of the problems I had with it.

   For the positives: this book was highly entertaining. I read it in an Audiobook format and usually those take me quite some time. This one I tried to listen to whenever possible, and that for me was kind of surprising since her first book,”When Dimple Met Rishi”, took me a looong time to finish, also in Audiobook. By the way, the narrators for this book are quite good, I enjoyed them both, they breathe life into the characters, I would reccomend to listen to it.

   Also, I enjoyed the diversity and the feminist vibe to it, how Twinkle was decided to be a figure on a male-dominated field. I’m also a sucker for epistolary or diary entries’ books, and this is a little bit of both, so I was on board there. But this is it. Everything else seriously ground my gears.

  Well, firstly, the plot. I have a very severe pet peeve about having talent shows or a special kind of prsentation or something of the sorts as the main plot point. In “When Dimple Met Rishi”, there was a talent show in a programming camp, here is the “Misummer Night” in high school. I’m just not a fan, I think it’s a cheap, lazy, overused plot device. It became also hard to suspend my disbelief in some points where they could get professional stuff for the film, just by pretending to be important, or out of donations or whatever, it all felt terribly convenient.

   Despite those problems the thing that made me actively dislike the book were the characters. Twinkle’s convinced her talent means that the world owes something to her, that because she’s such a genious, the others have to listen to her. Her character arc suggests that she goes from cute, normal, sweet girl to arrogant monster to then again perfect cute talented girl, but since the beggining I felt the arrogance, how conceited she was, and didn’t enjoy it a bit. Some stuff that she did was passed off as normal, as a product of indicision, but I would argue that they were traits of a bad character, such as the way she dealt with Sahil, and how judgemental she was.

   Sahil himself was also a bit problematic, specially on what concerned his brother; there is jealousy and ressentment, that are normal, ok, but then there are pathological jealousy and resentment, and I think he suffers from the last kind, and that went untouched.

   Maddie, Twinkle’s supposedly best friend was, for me, the worst character of all,with attitudes that were, in the end, brushed off. Friendship, specially female friendship, needs to take a bigger role in YA, in my opinion, but the way Twinkle groveled behind Maddie, almost begging for her friendship seemed horrible in my eyes.

   I must admit that I would have enjoyed it more if I was the age this book  is targeted towards. I’m 25 now, way past my high school days, but I still enjoy high school stories. Just not this one, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

 

My rating: 1.5/5.0