Bareilly to Beverly Hills is the journey sixteen-year-old Shalini Agarwal makes when her father moves to a new job in Los Angeles. And that journey, along with the changes it brings for Shalini and her family, is what Kavita Daswani's 'Lovetorn' is about.
This book reads like the script of a dozen Hollywood films. Teen heroine moves to new town and new school, is targeted by the hip clique, is attracted to the cutest boy within a five-mile radius. Of course, Shalini Agarwal is smart, academically ahead of her class, well-mannered and a domestic goddess in the making. In Bareilly, ideal. In LA, not so much. Yes, nothing's changed since Cinderella. Shalini needs a makeover before she can fit in, like every Cinderella worth her glass slipper.
Daswani insists though, that Shalini is "owning who she is" by threading her eyebrows and not, as it appears, selling out to the mainstream. And just to give her that extra edge, Shalini joins a school group working to help women in third-world countries. Ironic that the Bareilly girl in California discovers herself while working on projects to aid Nepali women, but there it is. In any case, Shalini not only discovers herself but also a cute flute-playing American boy. Flute, get it? Like Krishna. It seems you can take our heroine out of Bareilly but not Bareilly out of our heroine.
Daswani attempts to darken the book's bubblegum-pink universe by adding a clinically depressed mother and a childhood
03:24 PM, Nov 23, 2012
Written by Kavita Daswani, 'Bombay Girl' is a story of Sohana Badshah, who has led a charmed existence " carefree, wealthy and from a close-knit family (at least as far she knows). And then she moves to London on a whim to pursue an interior design course, where she meets and falls passionately in love with Jagdish Sachdev - he of the compassionate heart and matchless brains. But Jag leaves...
04:32 PM, Jul 19, 2012
