Abandoning this at 20%. Maybe someday I'll read the end, but it's too tedious to read it all.

This book was so much more than I thought it was upon picking it up. While I just thought this was going to be a more ethnic version of your YA novel, it is actually a meta fictional biting commentary on Asians and high schools and overacheiving and the story structure in general. I wish everyone was reading this but I worry that no one shall. ( )

OK.. On the whole, I liked it.

- I really really enjoyed the whole meta angle. I've read journal-entry books before, and I've read "and then I sat down to write about my adventure" books before, but I don't think I've ever read a journal-entry book where the journal entries are about the struggle the author-narrator is having with writing a journal-entry book.. that's based on their real life. I guess it's a testament to the writing style and to the gimmick that I was assuming the author was a woman until I got to the end of the book and saw the author photo on the back flap.
- (Relatedly) Wasserman was hilarious, and I can't decide if he's the best therapist ever or the worst therapist ever (although it seems like he should be in therapy himself lmao).
- (Also relatedly) The literary agent was also funny; she said, while talking to a teenage Indian girl named Reshma who had sent her a manuscript of a journal-entry book whose author-narrator was a teenage Indian girl named Reshma and had an awful similar life to the real Reshma, "Obviously the Reshma in your book is a fictional character."
- I'm not sure if we're supposed to like Reshma by the end or not. She seems pretty clearly psychotic, on some level, and also enormously privileged. But we've also just spent an entire novel in her head and gotten to see a lot of rationale. On the whole, I think I don't like her, but do recognize her as an interesting storytelling device (which is OOC for me; I hardly ever like books with unlikable MCs). She seems like a spoiled, entitled asshole, but also like a genuinely hard worker and I think she's on the right path at the end of the novel. (Although, the very last scene: she reasons that the commercial shoe retailer she works at is badly run, and it stays in business, so they must all be badly run, so it ought to be fairly easy to take over the commercial shoe retailer market. Does not inspire tremendous confidence that she's learned her lesson.)
- Wasn't super happy with the treatment of plagiarism; I think her attitude toward it never really changed and she wasn't told off often or strongly enough by those around her. Plaigiarism is actually v bad, and while I guess she did experience quite bad consequences, it didn't feel like she'd learned her lesson.
- Reminded me in some ways of HPMOR - specifically, the "my blood is running cold and my voice is lowering and my eyes are narrowing and I'm about to absolutely destroy you" effect that HPMOR!Harry and Reshma both experience. Also in the belief that backing down is hardly ever the best option and really from a moral standpoint ought to not even be considered.
- There was a great line like, "America changed the rules. Now, you don't just have to study hard and be the best, you have to look good and sound good at the same time. If they hadn't, we [Asians] would have taken over this country by now."
- idk, it just feels like Reshma doesn't experience any real consequences for all the shitty stuff she does. Yes, she doesn't get into Stanford, but it was always a long shot, she does get to experience being accepted, and the rejection comes w/ like a third of the book left, which she spends still doing shitty stuff. Her life is gonna go alright, and she's made peace with that. Her parents love her unconditionally, ofc; yes, they're disappointed, they've lost some respect, but our narrator has spent the entire book talking about how little respect she has for *them*, and I didn't really care much for their opinion.
- Really quite funny.

Overall.. 8.5/10 ( )

I know many Reshma's and at one point I wondered where I would be if I had been as cut throats and hyper focused as she was.

The novel within a novel felt a bit contrived at times and the mom sending her to her therapist who was also an aspiring writer...well, that just seemed a bit more of satire. But the best parts of this book were the social commentaries we rarely discuss-- The undercurrent of discrimination faced by Asian students applying for college, the expectations of their parents, the biases of their teachers who hold them to a different standard, kids who get in through legacy, etc...
After reading a series of YA dystopia, this was a refreshing novel with an equally refreshing protagonist. ( )

Look, I get it. The protagonist of this story is an antihero. She's someone everyone loves to hate. But guess what? This book firmly establishes that Indian-Americans can be assholes too.

Say what?!?

I know, right? Brown people are just people too? Who knew?

It's not just about the mangoes, and spices, and... arranged marriages. Or whatever. Yes, of course culture plays a role in this book; it wouldn't be realistic otherwise (nor do I think the story would progress in the exact same manner). But it's not the main focus. Would this story have worked if Reshma had been white? For the most part, I think so.

So I say, let's have more of this! Not necessarily brown people as assholes, but more of everything. Brown people just doing normal things, living their lives, being their complex, complicated selves. We don't need sarees and henna on the cover of every book by people of South Asian origin.

*steps off soapbox* ( )