When Dimple Met Rishi

Girl-meets-boy gets a charming update in Sandhya Menon’s hilarious romantic novel, When Dimple Met Rishi, published in 2017. Dimple Shah is an ambitious 18-year-old tech nerd with a passion for coding and an aversion to her mother’s insistence that she find the “ideal Indian husband.” She’s overjoyed when she’s sent to an app-development camp for the summer, and is intent on winning the program competition and keeping all other distractions at bay. Rishi Patel, on the other hand, is a hopeless romantic whose main interest in attending the same program is the possibility of meeting his future wife, after his parents tell him that the young woman they had in mind happens to be signed up. While there, Rishi and Dimple are paired together and, inevitably, tensions rise and sparks fly. But in the face of their many differences and the pressures of their family expectations, the two find a connection uniquely their own. Menon’s novel, which Netflix adapted into the 2017 series Mismatched, was lauded for its sweet and hilarious takes not only on young love, but also on the experiences of first-generation Indian Americans. —Cady Lang

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