Catarina Agatta has spent the last two years fending for herself after the dangerous corporation Cartaxus showed up and took away her only companions: Lachlan Agatta the world’s leading gene-coder and may be the planet’s only hope for wiping out the deadly Hydra virus. Then a supersoldier named Cole arrives at Cat’s house with the news that her father has died and that Cole needs Cat’s help to finish creating the vaccine Lachlan started.

The fun of This Mortal Coil is that it’s often using your own expectations of the genre against you. What seems obvious in one moment turns out to be a function of what you thought a YA novel of this sort would be planning. As a reader of the end, I knew what some of the twists and turns were going to be (and some I guessed), but the fun of the book is still in the way This Mortal Coil plays with, shifts, and dissects some of the tropes of dystopian YA.

It’s also the first in a trilogy, which means that any spoilery complaints I have now may be addressed in subsequent books. But let’s get to ’em.

SPOILERS NOW

REALLY SPOILERS

To avoid the problem where your eye skips over some text and accidentally reads it without your conscious intention, I will quickly talk about a common misconception regarding news articles about things that have a genetic component but are not hereditary in the same predictable input-makes-output way that things like dimples and colorblindness are.

If you read an article that says something is 40% heritable, this does not mean you are 40% likely to inherit it, or that 40% of people who get a certain gene will end up with a corresponding trait. Instead it means that genes account for 40% of the variability that exists for that trait among the surveyed population. Among the surveyed population is an important phrase here, because heritability varies wildly depending on the population you are surveying. Now you know.

On to the spoilers!

So it turns out that Cartaxus is basically good and fine (except I am not sure the book ever resolved the question of whether they were keeping people out of the bunkers on a eugenic basis — is that still true?), and Catarina’s father is the bad guy. This is a fun twist in the context of other YA books, which do love their shadowy corporate/governmental organizations. In the context of actual corporations from real life, it’s — less delightful. Cat goes into the bunkers and finds them to be sunshiney paradises. The hacktivists turn out to have been working with Cartaxus all along to ensure that coding improvements to genes reach the maximum number of people inside and outside the bunker. Cartaxus is good! Hail Cartaxus.

IDK, y’all. My hope is that This Mortal Coil was the book that muddied the dichotomy of Cartaxus Bad, Father Good that Cat started out with; and that in the second book, the reverse dichotomy will likewise be muddied. Certainly there are flaws and errors by Cartaxus allies in This Mortal Coil, but I didn’t feel completely comfortable with the corporation’s perceived level of benevolence by the end of the book.

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So the deal is that Dimple, a budding coder, gets permission from her parents to attend Insomnia Con, at which the winning app design will receive support and backing from legendary computer person Jenny Lindt. BUT THERE’S A CATCH. Unbeknownst to Dimple, her parents have set her up to meet with Rishi Patel, the son of their friends and a (hypothetically) perfect candidate to become Dimple’s husband someday. Are they paired up to be partners in app design? YOU KNOW IT, PAL.

Where to begin with things I loved about this book. Like, number one, I love a romantic comedy, and When Dimple Met Rishi is a perfect romantic comedy, from the disastrous first meeting to the wonderful side characters with their worthwhile subplots to the mushy, swoony declarations of love at the end. I truly do miss the era of fun, sweet, soft-hearted rom-com films, and When Dimple Met Rishi filled that hole in my heart.

Number two, I adore and cherish Dimple for her strengths — her brilliance, her drive and ambition, her love for her parents even when they’re driving her batty — as well as for her weaknesses. She acts quickly and on instinct in ways that can make her a little mean and dismissive, which resonated with me as a somewhat mean and dismissive person. I loved her for always coming back to her mistakes and trying to find ways to make them right, and I loved that she let herself see Rishi for who he was, rather than just what he stood for (the Ideal Indian Husband).

Number three and oh so much of this, I love that Menon let Rishi do emotions. This is a boy who wants to grow up to be a father and husband, and it is vanishingly rare to encounter such a boy in fiction (even though I have encountered several of them in real life). He’s gentle but not weak, and he stands up for Dimple from the first moment they meet, and it’s the damn best.

Is there Bollywood dancing? Yes there is Bollywood dancing. Are there rude rich kids who get put in their place? Abso-damn-lutely. When Dimple Met Rishi. Do yourself a favor and read it ASAP.

Thanks to Janani, among others, for raving about this book so hard that I had to read it. ETA: Aarti is my review twin today! Check out her review also!

The post Review: When Dimple Met Rishi, Sandhya Menon appeared first on Reading the End.

Just absolutely everything about Miel and Sam’s relationship made me happy. I love it that McLemore lets them have sex YOU KNOW AS TEENS DO SOMETIMES and they aren’t punished for it. I love it that even though they are clearly devoted to each other throughout the book, they also mess things up with each other and have to apologize and figure things out with each other afterward. I love that they’re desperately attracted to each other (yay for depicting passion in queer relationships!) and sometimes that’s good and easy, and sometimes it makes already-complicated issues more complicated.

The truth slid over her skin, that if she loved him, sometimes it would mean doing nothing. It would mean being still. It would mean saying nothing, but standing close enough so he would know she was there, that she was staying.

And I love that they get a happy ending. Queer kids deserve happy endings.

What else, let’s see. Oh, I loved it that the antagonists of the book, four nearly identical white sisters who have ruled the town all their lives and are trying to keep that situation going, are still clearly the protagonists of their own stories. I got anxious around the midpoint that the Bonner girls were being set up as Bad Femininity to contrast against Miel’s Good Femininity, which is a trope I could not be more tired of, but the climax of the book reclaims enough interiority for all the Bonners to satisfy my greedy heart.

It’s interesting — When the Moon Was Ours is not, as I’ve said, my type of book. I prefer a book that bothers less about lush prose and more about thrilling adventures and robot pals perhaps; less magic realism and more straight-ahead magic with really specific rules and nefarious power struggles perhaps. But I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to have a book like this in my hands and know that it’s available to teenagers, to let them know a little bit more about the possibilities the world offers.

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