[Review] Kismat Connection - Ananya Devarajan

Summary: Madhuri Iyer is doomed. Doomed for her upcoming senior year to be a total failure, according to her astrology-obsessed mother, and doomed to a happily ever after with her first boyfriend, according to her family curse.
 
Determined to prove the existence of her free will, Madhuri devises an experimental relationship with the one boy she knows she’ll never fall for: her childhood best friend, Arjun Mehta. But Arjun’s feelings for her are a variable she didn’t account for.
 
As Madhuri starts to fall for her experimental boyfriend, she’ll have to decide if charting her own destiny is worth breaking Arjun’s heart—and her own. (Pub Date: Jun 13 2023)

 

This should have been a pretty straightforward plot: two childhood friends, with families so close one takes care of the other's kid. Arjun has been in love with Madhuri forever, but Madhuri has lived through so much trauma thanks to their family origins, she's run from her culture and couldn't stand the idea of becoming the cliché who gets together with the only other brown kid from school. Until her horoscope predicts failure for her life. She allies with Arjun to prove her horoscope wrong and guarantee the future she's always given her everything for.

2+

We have an ownvoice story, with lots of elements of the Indian culture. I was in love with it all in the beginning, but I confess it lost me very quickly. Still, it's a very good discussion of the prejudice both Madhuri and Arjun need to face, even though each does it their own way. Madhuri's trauma about her dance, the coconut oil's smell, it was even painful to read. I may hope it didn't come from the author's own experience, but I'm sure even if she didn't go through it personally, thousands of kids do. 

And we have a trope we all love—fake relationship. Though their agreement isn't that their relationship will be fake, it comes with the same excitement of sudden intimacy. Only... it wasn't exciting.

The problem with this book is that the style of writing is a mess. The English level, the grammar, it's all excellent, and yet, it's badly written like a beginner wrote it and then someone who is a good writer just went through it again and made the text more mature, leaving the development, the reaction of the characters, the scene progression at the level of a beginner's. Whenever I started to get into the story, something weird would happen. Some change of heart out of nowhere, some sudden fight, someone getting angry, or sad, or desperate from 0 to 100 in a second. Then, as we get closer to the end, a random dramatic event comes almost out of nowhere, and I still haven't figured out its function to the story. It's inconsistent and hard to get into thanks to that.

And it is a pity, because as I said, the author writes well, she has chosen interesting themes, but the execution was way lacking, unfortunately.

Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.

Rating: 2 out of 5.