Review: From Twinkle, with Love

From Twinkle, with Love by Sandhya Menon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Though unrelated to When Dimple Met Rishi, Sandhya Menon's second book captures a lot of the same style - very #ownvoices Indian, very YA, very rom-com. Though I had to say while Dimple was more of a 3.5 rounded up to a 4 for me, From Twinkle, with Love was more easily a solid 4.

I think part of the reason why I enjoyed this one more was because of the use of first-person POV instead of third - which makes sense since this one uses an epistolary style, composed mostly of Twinkle's letters to numerous influential women filmmakers (Ava DuVernay, Mira Nair, Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow, and more are name-dropped as recipients of the letters that form most of the book, in between various email and text exchanges between other characters.) But yeah, POV - those who follow my reviews know that I've often found myself downgrading third-person POV novels just because I've found it harder to connect to those characters. And also because Twinkle and her friends focus more on the A in STEAM, which immediately gets me more interested than the more scientifically-minded Dimple and Rishi because my trade, creative writing, definitely falls more under art. And what an art Twinkle wants to make, Dracu-lass, for which I'd frankly pay good money for the inevitable movie adaptation just so I can see at least some amount of Twinkle's project come to life. And then, of course, there's the very intriguing little love-triangle twist, in which Sahil's crushed out on Twinkle but she thinks his identical twin Neil is her secret email pen pal? One of the best in the business right there - though don't go by me too much; I'm not exactly a romance expert and I almost always ship wrong. This time, however? I shipped right.

So while this one's not directly connected to Dimple, it's still nice to know that Menon's coming back to that 'verse with There's Something About Sweetie next year. And hey, what if that book proves to be the crossover between its two predecessors? I'd love to see more of Twinkle and Sahil and Skid. :)

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