Lovetorn by Kavita Daswani

When Shalini’s father gets a new job in L.A., she is torn away from her life in India and the boy to whom she’s been betrothed since she was three. L.A. is so different, and Shalini dresses and talks all wrong. She isn’t sure she’ll survive high school in America without her fiancé, Vikram, and now she has to cope with her mom’s homesickness and depression. A new friend, chill and confident Renuka, helps Shalini find her way and get up the courage to join the Food4Life club at school. But she gets more than just a friend when she meets Toby—she gets a major crush. Shalini thinks she loves Vikram, but he never made her feel like this.
In Lovetorn, Shalini discovers that your heart ultimately makes its own choices, even when it seems as if your destiny has already been chosen.


Author Kavita Daswani has always been fascinated by child marriages and betrothals, and this story of a traditional girl from India, who is exposed to so many more freedoms and experiences after being dropped in a completely alien culture, is a fresh and contemporary look at the subject.


My Thoughts/Review:

When I first started this book, I had fairly high expectations, and thought that it was going to be a cute feel good romance. I was wrong, because to me, there wasn't very much romance, and the main character's feelings were much more than love, it was mostly affection that she felt for Vikram. You can't live almost your entire life engaged to a boy without at least feel a flicker of affection. Her feelings with Toby were slightly different, but it struck me as a crush, mostly. That's just the way I feel, but you may feel completely different.

Shalini herself was a very interesting character, because you don't read very many books where the main character is Hindi. At least I haven't. I would love to read more about their culture and customs, but I'm a reader of fictions. :P

Something that struck me as different was the way that Shalini (what a pretty name) treated her elders and her superiors. She was being teased mercilessly, and through it all she was just the sweetest girl imaginable. She had a few character flaws, but we were all put on this earth with flaws. Another thing, is that the boy choices weren't really capitalized on, and really didn't get very much character development, or really any romance at all, and again, I thought this was a romance. Nothing really happened between Shalini and Toby, or Shalini and Vikram. And I think that if your going to market your YA book as romance, at least put just a little in it. I can't say that I loved this book, but I definitely enjoyed it.
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                                                            Favorite Quote:
These images used to be crystal clear, precise. But today they were faded and remote, like scenes from a movie I had seen long ago, scenes from someone else's life.