Review: From Twinkle, with Love by Sandhya Menon

From Twinkle, with Love

Sandhya Menon

Publication Date: May 22, 2018

Hardcover, 330 pages, Simon Pulse

Genres: YA, Contemporary

Goodreads

An aspiring teen filmmaker finds her voice and falls in love in this delightful romantic comedy from the New York Times bestselling author of When Dimple Met Rishi.

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.

My Review

I find myself in a weird position when it comes to Sandhya Menon’s young adult contemporary books. While I absolutely love her ideas and the family dynamics she creates for her characters, I feel like Menon just misses the mark when it comes to delving into the coolest parts of her story ideas—the character’s projects. In this book, it’s Twinkle’s short film (though I’m not sure how original her project actually was), and in Menon’s previous book, it was Dimple’s coding project. Both didn’t get the amount of page time I desired.

I pushed my disappointment for that aside, however, because I do really enjoy Menon’s main characters. They’re super realistic. I very much empathized with Twinkle and how crappy her friend was treating her. But Twinkle isn’t innocent in it all. She made some bad decisions and got a little full of herself. The side characters, including Twinkle’s friend, were very annoying, unfortunately. I’m not sure if it’s just because I’m not in high school anymore or if they’re really just all bad friends and people. I can’t say. I can say that to me, they seemed annoying and selfish.

I did like the love interest, Sahil. He was cute and a disaster. He did kind of let himself be pushed around a lot, though. The one time he did snap, I questioned if he was really a good guy or not because it was just such a weird thing to get mad about. But again, these are teenagers. Irrational, hormonal, awkward teenagers. Yikes. Twinkle and Sahil are still charming together, and I wish we’d gotten more time with their relationship, as well as for both of their families. The familial aspects of the story didn’t really seem finished, sadly.

So overall, I’m conflicted with this one. I LOVE Menon’s ability to build characters who are unique with unique dreams and goals and families and friends, but I always feel like there’s something missing by the end of the book. They’re all still fun reads, though, and I think I’ll pick up the companion novels eventually. This is huge considering I don’t read YA contemporary very often anymore.