When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

It’s been a while since I’ve read this, but I’m catching up on old reviews so I thought I would start with this one.  While I liked When Dimple Met Rishi, I’m once again going to be the black sheep here because I absolutely did not love it.  In fact, it took me like 2 weeks to read – I just found myself constantly falling asleep while reading it, and I’m not sure if that’s because of the stress of the things going on in my life at the time, or because I didn’t really find the book to be all the interesting.  In fact, I found it to be pretty predictable and not all that exciting, and I really hate admitting this because it seems that everyone else really loved this book.

“‘I think having a blueprint makes life boring.  Maybe I don’t want to get married or have kids or any of that.  Maybe I just want a career and that’s all.’
Rishi looked at her, frank and open.  ‘And that doesn’t sound lonely to you?'”

Dimple knows what she wants from her life.  She wants to go to the college of her dreams, but first, she wants to attend a summer program for web developers and aspiring web developers.  When she finally manages to convince her parents to let her go because it would be a great plan for her future, she thinks she is in the clear – a few weeks away from her mother’s constant plea for Dimple to find a great husband and settle down.  Or for her to wear makeup.  Dimple just wants to do something she wants to do and follow her dreams.

Meanwhile, Rishi’s parents have convinced him that Dimple is a perfect girl for him, and that he would do well getting her to settle down with him.  He decides to attend the same program for web developers as Dimple, where he imagines the two of them meeting again and falling head over heels in love, living happily ever after.

Only, it doesn’t quite work out that way for them.

In fact, Dimple wants nothing to do with Rishi at first.  She even throws her iced coffee at him when he introduces himself to her as her future husband.

When Dimple and Rishi are paired up in class to work on the main project together, Dimple is less than pleased.  She tries to get a new partner, but to her dismay, she is stuck with Rishi, and the two of them must work together.

“That first day, after she got over the shock of him popping up out of nowhere, he’d caught her eye.  Dimple hadn’t been looking for this…whatever it was between them at all.  But somehow she had a feeling that love had found her.  It was circling them, waiting for the perfect spot to land.”

Slowly but surely, the two start to become friends, and then they start to develop a little more than friendship with one another.  But what happens when the program is over and the two of them go home?

Just because I found When Dimple Met Rishi to be a bit predictable doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy it, because I did.  It was a sweet romance with tons of humor mixed in and an awesome girl who went after her dreams and wasn’t going to let anyone hold her back from what she really wanted.  I loved that.  I loved Dimple’s character.  She was fierce, and I think that YA needs more fierce characters like her.  She knew what she wanted, and it wasn’t a settle-down-and-get-married kind of romance like her family wanted for her.  She wanted to do something really big, and she went after it.  She was a truly inspiring character.

There was so much humor in this book and I found myself laughing a lot while reading – especially in the beginning of the book when Dimple and Rishi first meet.

I just wish that A.) The synopsis didn’t give so much away about the two of them ending up in love, and B.) I wasn’t able to guess exactly how the book was going to end.  I guess I wish there would have been some kind of surprises thrown in there, but there wasn’t.  It kind of followed the same formula as a lot of other YA contemporary romances, and while I can’t say it ruined the book for me, I was just hoping for something a little different.

Would I read When Dimple Met Rishi again?  Maybe.  It definitely made me laugh a few times and it does have a sweet romance, so if I’m in the mood for something like that again, I might reread it.  I would definitely read another book by this author, because I did like the way she was able to create such fleshed out characters and add so much humor and witty banter into the story.

When Dimple Met Rishi is a cute story that has diversity, a no-nonsense character who goes after what she wants, and a lot of heartfelt moments, that’s for sure.  But at the same time, it lacked the ability to keep me interested for very long, and I wasn’t able to really be drawn into the story the way I would have liked.