Review: There's Something About Sweetie

There's Something About Sweetie by Sandhya Menon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sandhya Menon is one of those YA rom-com writers who never fails to get all the laughs out of me, and There's Something About Sweetie, her long-awaited follow-up to her debut novel, is no exception. In many ways opposite to When Dimple Met Rishi, here we get a hotheaded guy and gentle girl instead of Dimple and Rishi's deliberate inversion of gender stereotypes. But oh, how they both get some character dynamism over the course of the book. Especially Ashish, who proves himself so much more mature than his rebellious player self from Book 1 - even if he still scoffs at a lot of his parents' expectations, namely, his insistence on eating bacon behind their backs. And as for Sweetie, totally living up to her name, she may have a lot of internalized shame about being fat because of how hypercritical her family is about it, but she's already got such a strong core of confidence - helped in no small part by her own athletic prowess - that it really makes the difference in how she ultimately gains the courage to stand up for herself against certain nasty relatives. And, just like When Dimple Met Rishi, this book is a pretty spot-on cross-section of certain sections of Silicon Valley society: it's very diverse in all the ways, with numerous races and sexual identities repped on the side, but also highlights a bit of class divide, with Sweetie being nowhere near as rich as Ashish's family (though at least she doesn't think a gallon of milk costs twelve bucks a pop! Well, maybe at Whole Foods it does.) About the only quibble I could give geographically is how many lakes this book suggests the Silicon Valley has - trust me, if they do, they're tiny. But while I'm not sure if Menon is going to write any more books in this universe, if not, at least she ends Dimple, Rishi, Ashish, and Sweetie's universe on a high, sweet, humorous note.

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