A Girl Like That

From the publishers:
Sixteen-year-old Zarin Wadia is many things: a bright and vivacious student, an orphan, a risk taker. She’s also the kind of girl that parents warn their kids to stay away from: a troublemaker whose many romances are the subject of endless gossip at school. You don't want to get involved with a girl like that, they say. So how is it that eighteen-year-old Porus Dumasia has only ever had eyes for her? And how did Zarin and Porus end up dead in a car together, crashed on the side of a highway in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia? When the religious police arrive on the scene, everything everyone thought they knew about Zarin is questioned. And as her story is pieced together, told through multiple perspectives, it becomes clear that she was far more than just a girl like that. This beautifully written debut novel from Tanaz Bhathena reveals a rich and wonderful new world to readers; tackles complicated issues of race, identity, class, and religion; and paints a portrait of teenage ambition, angst, and alienation that feels both inventive and universal

My thoughts:
Before the reader even gets to know Zarin and Porus, they are dead, their spirits holding on to each other and talking as plainly as if they were taking a ride in his jalopy car about both profound and mundane things. The story of how they got there is slowly revealed in the rest of this novel through the perspective of these two characters but also through other characters and the misconceptions that these characters had or the things that were done. Time is interesting in this novel because it goes both forward and backward. It also deviates from the main characters into side stories that the main characters would never know about. The storytelling was so novel and the culture presented so foreign to me that as I got to know more about this world and these lives, I was hoping for some miracle at the end, but that was not to be.

This is a cultural story as much as it is a love story. It is a story about social mores that are unfamiliar to the American psyche. This is also an immigrant story, perhaps a story similar to our own dreamers. The author, Ms. Bhathena, in her author's note defines this story best:

My own story is different from Zarin's and Mishal's. Yet it does not make their stories any less true, nor does it diminish the reality of living in a world that still defines girls in various ways without letting them define themselves.              This book is a love letter to them all.

Publication date: Feb. 27, 2018