From Twinkle, With Love Book Review

From Twinkle, With Love by Sandhya Menon

From Goodreads: Aspiring filmmaker and wallflower Twinkle Mehra has stories she wants to tell and universes she wants to explore, if only the world would listen. So when fellow film geek Sahil Roy approaches her to direct a movie for the upcoming Summer Festival, Twinkle is all over it. The chance to publicly showcase her voice as a director? Dream come true. The fact that it gets her closer to her longtime crush, Neil Roy—a.k.a. Sahil’s twin brother? Dream come true x 2.

When mystery man “N” begins emailing her, Twinkle is sure it’s Neil, finally ready to begin their happily-ever-after. The only slightly inconvenient problem is that, in the course of movie-making, she’s fallen madly in love with the irresistibly adorkable Sahil.

Twinkle soon realizes that resistance is futile: The romance she’s got is not the one she’s scripted. But will it be enough?

Told through the letters Twinkle writes to her favorite female filmmakers, From Twinkle, with Love navigates big truths about friendship, family, and the unexpected places love can find you.

Thank you to Netgalley for giving me an e-book ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Okay, I was asked to give an honest review, so I figured I would do just that, even though I’m gritting my teeth a little bit at the prospect of it. Menon’s debut novel, When Dimple Met Rishi was one of my favourite contemporary novels of last year. I thought it was very funny and clever, and just a huge fluff-ball of awk-cute.

From Twinkle, With Love… not so much.

It started out pretty promising. I laughed at lots of moments, and I thought Sahil was very swoon-worthy. It seemed to be going in a good direction, one where I’d cheer for the two main characters and cross my fingers that they’d wind up together [even though it’s very obvious they will] and I’ll do my little tea-kettle squeal whenever they had an awkward interaction or first kiss.

And then Twinkle happened, and I just couldn’t like the book anymore. She starts out as an okay character, something of an every-man/underdog with a talent that makes her a huge nerd in school and a genius in college. I loved that the novel was told through letters to her female-director icons, and I liked how issues of class and culture weren’t ignored through Twinkle’s POV. It made me cheer for her for a while. And then somewhere down the line she turned into a kind of monster. She became really annoying and shallow, determined to get into the ‘popular’ group that she complained about because they’d stolen her friend away. And she wanted to do this by getting the perfect popular jock boyfriend, even though she knew nothing about him and clearly didn’t have anything other than a passing-glance kinda crush for him. It seemed a bit shallow and a poorly-conceived plan at the start, but then when Sahil shows up and he’s being incredibly sweet and she obviously has feelings for him, she still refuses to accept it because she wants to be part of the in-crowd. It was around here that I stopped liking her character. Actually, I wanted the ending to resolve with Sahil moving on from his feelings for Twinkle because he recognized she wasn’t a nice person. I mean, I don’t really know how you can move on from someone fancying your brother and spending time with you to get to them.

But Twinkle got worse. I don’t want to get too spoiler-y but she really morphs into the kind of character I can’t stand. And while there’s a resolution at the end which explains and fixes this, I just can’t get away with a book where I actively dislike the main character.

As a result, I’m giving From Twinkle, With Love a 4/10. Which is a shame, because I really liked When Dimple Met Rishi and I was hoping for some more meet-cute adorableness, but I was left feeling a little frustrated instead.

From Twinkle, With Love is available for preorder from Waterstones, Amazon UK and Book Depository. It will be released in the UK on May 22nd.