CBR 16 Bingo – Bollywood. The main character’s family is from Bangladesh, and part of the story takes place in Bangladesh.
I picked this book up for free expecting to read it once, and then probably put it in a local free little library. It pretty much met those standards, not exceptional but not horrible.
The book is about Rukhsana, a 17 year old girl with conservative Muslim parents. She strives to be an engineer, and next year she is going to Caltech, and away from her parents, so she can do that. However, her plans get ruined when they discover that she has a girlfriend, since her parents are homophobic. They send her off to Bangladesh to stay with family, and while she’s there she learns about her family, especially her grandmother and what she went through.
It’s good that this book was written to help offer different perspectives, but I just didn’t like it. It might be that I generally don’t read books advertised as romance because I find them boring, or that I just didn’t like the writing style. I felt like a lot of the plot relied very heavily on tropes and that also made it kind of boring for me.
It wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, and I didn’t hate it. Some parts of the plot were interesting but I found the characters mostly to be boring and fairly one-dimensional. For me, it was solidly mediocre and I just didn’t love it and probably wouldn’t read it again. Hopefully whoever picks it up from my local free little library enjoys it more than I did!