Take a photo of a barcode or cover
floralfox 's review for:
From Twinkle, with Love
by Sandhya Menon
I loved When Dimple Meet Rishi so when I spied From Twinkle, with Love at the library, I immediately checked it out and went home and started reading.
Like Dimple, Twinkle has a charming name, is the only child of immigrant parents, has a feminist streak, and has one really intense passion (in this case, it's directing films). Unlike Dimple, Twinkle's name is the only charming thing about her. Her narrative voice is really young and immature, and her main drive in the novel is to become popular so that her former best friend will stop being a coward and letting her new popular friend group treat Twinkle like dirt. There are several times where Maddie fails to stick up for Twinkle, ignores the way her new friends treats Twinkle, and fails to hold up her end of the friendship even on a one-on-one level. I stopped rooting for this friendship.
I empathized with Twinkle and how she felt her best friend slipping away from her. But her desire to become popular for the sake of her friendship with Maddie is not compelling in the face of the other plot.
Maddie convinces Twinkle to make a film for the end-of-the-year bash, and Twinkle is offered help by Sahil, the identical twin brother of Twinkle's crush, Neil. Twinkle barely interacts with Neil face-to-face in the whole novel (he's not even at school!) and she likes him because he's cute and popular, and dating him will land her in the same friend group as Maddie.
Sahil, who looks exactly the same as Neil, happens to share the same intense of love of film as Twinkle. And he happens to have had a crush on Twinkle for forever. And they happen to have wonderful chemistry, which Twinkle keeps ignoring because she's still starstruck for the absent Neil.
Sahil is the best part of the book, and the narrative is interrupted with text exchanges between him and his buddies. All these did for me is make me wish that Sahil was the narrator of this book, not Twinkle.
The other thing that irritated me about this book was the writing style. It's told in present-tense diary form, so Twinkle is supposedly writing at all sorts of weird times. While Sahil puts gas in the car. While a friend slips out to use the restroom. While she's in class. The entries are LONG and could not realistically be written in such a short time frame of some of the excuses she uses to describe events that just happened. The style just did not work.
As the plot progresses, Twinkle starts to learn to speak up for herself, but she sort of goes wild and berates and calls out people in ways that makes everyone uncomfortable, because she's no longer sticking up for herself, she's just being a dick. There's a point where she even contemplates doing something quite terrible, even against the advice of Sahil and Maddie, who point out that it is terrible. Twinkle is stubborn, though, and presses on against their advice until the last minute.
Twinkle's growth in this book is good at the end, but that doesn't change the fact that she's sort of unbearable for the other 95% of the book.
Like Dimple, Twinkle has a charming name, is the only child of immigrant parents, has a feminist streak, and has one really intense passion (in this case, it's directing films). Unlike Dimple, Twinkle's name is the only charming thing about her. Her narrative voice is really young and immature, and her main drive in the novel is to become popular so that her former best friend will stop being a coward and letting her new popular friend group treat Twinkle like dirt. There are several times where Maddie fails to stick up for Twinkle, ignores the way her new friends treats Twinkle, and fails to hold up her end of the friendship even on a one-on-one level. I stopped rooting for this friendship.
I empathized with Twinkle and how she felt her best friend slipping away from her. But her desire to become popular for the sake of her friendship with Maddie is not compelling in the face of the other plot.
Maddie convinces Twinkle to make a film for the end-of-the-year bash, and Twinkle is offered help by Sahil, the identical twin brother of Twinkle's crush, Neil. Twinkle barely interacts with Neil face-to-face in the whole novel (he's not even at school!) and she likes him because he's cute and popular, and dating him will land her in the same friend group as Maddie.
Sahil, who looks exactly the same as Neil, happens to share the same intense of love of film as Twinkle. And he happens to have had a crush on Twinkle for forever. And they happen to have wonderful chemistry, which Twinkle keeps ignoring because she's still starstruck for the absent Neil.
Sahil is the best part of the book, and the narrative is interrupted with text exchanges between him and his buddies. All these did for me is make me wish that Sahil was the narrator of this book, not Twinkle.
The other thing that irritated me about this book was the writing style. It's told in present-tense diary form, so Twinkle is supposedly writing at all sorts of weird times. While Sahil puts gas in the car. While a friend slips out to use the restroom. While she's in class. The entries are LONG and could not realistically be written in such a short time frame of some of the excuses she uses to describe events that just happened. The style just did not work.
As the plot progresses, Twinkle starts to learn to speak up for herself, but she sort of goes wild and berates and calls out people in ways that makes everyone uncomfortable, because she's no longer sticking up for herself, she's just being a dick. There's a point where she even contemplates doing something quite terrible, even against the advice of Sahil and Maddie, who point out that it is terrible. Twinkle is stubborn, though, and presses on against their advice until the last minute.
Twinkle's growth in this book is good at the end, but that doesn't change the fact that she's sort of unbearable for the other 95% of the book.