Reviews with content warning for Addiction - All This Could Be Different

A coming-of-age style story about a millennial queer South Asian immigrant to America, just trying to find her way and not disappoint her parents and friends. It is a mix of feelings, sweet but sharp, sad but hopeful. These characters are real, vivid, complex, and honestly messy and sometimes unlikeable. The main character, Sneha, is blunt, stubborn, independent, scared, uncertain, but also worthy of love (which she has to figure out). Mathews’ writing is impeccable with poignant social commentary and witty prose. I loved the explorations of these relationships, and while the ending didn’t feel perfectly tied up, that’s just life. Honestly, my biggest gripe is that this writer doesn’t use quotation marks for diologue, and that truly confused me sometimes.

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minchreads's review

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emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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_listeninc0untz's review against another edition

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inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.5

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billyjepma's review

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challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I had to read this in increments over several months, not because it wasn’t good or because I wasn’t invested, but because it rang with a truth too heavy for me to manage at the time. I will admit to not reading much fiction of this style—you all know that I live in weird genre stuff almost exclusively—so take this with a grain of salt if you want, but this is one of the most honest and truthful representations of what it feels like to be a twenty-something in America. All of the crushing anxieties over whether you’re political enough, angry at the right things, aware of your internalized prejudices, rebellious against the systems that you know will also keep you alive and happy, the quiet bitterness at how goddamn hard it all is—all of that is here in savage details that feel sharply unique yet fully relatable.

Even when the protagonist makes mistakes and acts like a shitty person, Matthew’s characterization ensures that we know it’s a side effect of a deeper issue (usually internalized racism, prejudice, or self-hatred redirected outward). Our world is messy, and the people in it are clumsy, and I appreciate it when a book lets its protagonist be messy and clumsy without defining her by those things.

The book is also rich with cultural specificities that reckon with realities I’ve never experienced or probably considered—the fears, hopes, and other turbulent, fragile emotions involved in trying to, or trying not to, assimilate into a society that might not want you. That Matthews does it with this much confidence and care feels like a massive feat. She wields emotion like a scalpel and a sledgehammer, sometimes simultaneously. It leads to a book that’s often ugly in how honest it is—which is why I had to pace my reading—but also deeply empathetic. There’s tremendous compassion in these pages, compassion that’s informed by harsh realities and supported by fragile hopes that, when carried communally, can become the precious things that keep us alive.

A wonderful book. I don’t think I’ll ever read it again, but it has left fingerprints on me.

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danidamico's review

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emotional funny reflective sad

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

"The anger did not arise from what he was describing; it rose from an expectation for a much better life than the one he owned".

"I stared off into the low dark, thinking about how to shape a life's great turbulence into a story".

"How will we learn about the world if not from each other?".

"My family is a geode of silences. You would need a hammer to smash it open".

"Just as romantic love faded or fractured, so too could friendship end. But nobody consoles you after a rupture with a beloved friend. There are few movies ideal for watching while your tears salt pints of ice cream, no articles in women's magazines that you can skim at the hairdresser's. You have only the ache. No script to accompany it. No ritual to give it shape".

"How was anyone expected to dream loftily about the future when the present ground them down to powder and nothingness?".

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cleo_reads's review

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5.0

Wow, this is a remarkable debut and also a remarkable book. Also remarkably hopeful and generous for lit fic.

I found parts of it heavy, both because of all of the content warnings I put below and because it's such an emotionally accurate portrayal of being in your early 20s and wow, can that be hard to read about. But it's ultimately hopeful and uplifting.

Here's Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya's review, the review that convinced me to give it a try, even though I don't usually like lit fic - https://www.autostraddle.com/all-this-could-be-different-review/

A note for my fellow genre romance readers - this is absolutely not a genre romance - the MC does have a messy, on again, off again relationship but there's no hfn or hea and that felt like the absolutely right choice to me. This is a brilliantly written lit fic, coming of age story and that's what it should be read as.

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alyon's review

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Content Warnings

dhritigupta's review

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adventurous emotional funny hopeful lighthearted reflective relaxing sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

this one is a complicated 4 stars:

i really loved the prose in this, it was beautiful but also easy to read! i also felt like i haven’t seen many of these types of stories where the main character was brown and queer, so that representation was special.

that being said, i think there were a few things that detracted points for me, the main one being the way the two Black characters were handled in the book. i feel like tig and their sister were both used to explore issues that the author wasn't really in the place to explore?? like when coming from an author who isn’t black, it comes off more like perpetuating stereotypes than anything else. also feel a bit weird abt the author using aave and Black slang in those character’s dialogues for the same reasons.

i’m also kind of the in the camp that “imperfect” characters don’t have to say problematic shit for no reason… like there’s some weird stuff sneha says or thinks that i guess makes sense for the time the story is set in, but also doesn’t really add anything to the plot or her development. so why!

i feel like the romance with a white character started as a bit of commentary on how brown people are obsessed with whiteness but then evolved into a very real thing that i was supposed to ship… i cant! are u asking me to forget all those weird micro aggressions? i did not like the love interest and it made me sad to see sneha going through it for a white girl who really really wasn’t worth the trouble

last qualm: the book did suchhh a good job sometimes with describing cultural stuff/indian daughter stuff/immigrant stuff that it made me so confused when some low hanging metaphor or simile about mangos and saris was made. it was a mixed bag in that regard

i still enjoyed the book a lot though, especially with its emphasis on the power of platonic love, exploration of the feeling of safety, unique setting and descriptions of queer brown womanhood. a nice slice of life bildungsroman that was entertaining but reflective the whole way through

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