skygiants

I am basically the world's most biased reviewer of Rahul Kanakia's Enter Title Here, because a.) Rahul has been a good friend for many years and b.) I read an early draft of this book and fell madly in love with it on the spot and have been waiting FOREVER for the official version to come out!

Reshma Kapoor, the protagonist of Enter Title Here, is awful, and I love her very much. If you do not like awful protagonists, this might not be a book for you. On the other hand, if you like the kind of breathtakingly ruthless teenage girl whose character arc eventually ends her in a place where she can say "nowadays, I try not to destroy people unless I am at least 90% sure that they deserve it," then this book is DEFINITELY for you.

Reshma is a high school senior, and the most important thing she's got going for her is that she's willing to do more to get what she wants than anyone else in her school. Somewhere between Cersei Lannister and a Terminator, you find Reshma Kapoor. Reshma is determined about two things: she is going to be valedictorian, and she is going to get into Stanford. But there are thirty-one thousand valedictorians in this country, and only sixteen hundred spots at Stanford, which means she also needs a hook.

That hook is going to be the currently-untitled novel that Reshma is writing, which will take her through an exploration of Normal Teenagerhood, building to an epiphany:

By the end of the novel, I'll turn into a whimsical girl who harvests all the possible joy from each moment and lives a carefree existence and lets the future take care of itself and all that other bullshit.

I don't mind calling it that because, you see, we're still at the beginning of the novel, and right now I'm still my cynical old achievement-obsessed self. But in three hundred thirty-two pages, you and I are going to look back on that 'bullshit' and laugh at the naiveté of my hard-bitten prose.

Obviously, in order to progress through her character arc, Reshma also needs:

a best friend -- Alex, the one person in school as ruthless as Reshma is, who supplies Reshma with Adderall and can therefore be blackmailed into answering Reshma's texts and inviting her to parties
a rival -- Chelsea, the one everyone thinks really deserves to be valedictorian, who can't possibly be as nice as she seems (or can she?) (OR CAN'T SHE??)
a couple of contrasting love interests -- that's Aakash, the deeply earnest nerd who's pined after her for years, and George, the underprivileged jock who lives in the basement to stay in the better school district and has deeply resented her for years, and one of them is almost certain to be Reshma's true love as long as they never, ever find out about Reshma's real self
a villain -- maybe Reshma's mom, whose inconvenient sense of ethics leads her to disapprove of her daughter's willingness to break the rules for personal gain? or her Nice White Lady English teacher, who's convinced that Reshma's parents are the ones pushing her to the edge? or maybe Susan Le, the wunderkind tech mogul who stole Reshma's parents' company out from under them? so many possibilities!
a mentor -- Reshma's psychiatrist/literary critic, who thinks that all this structure and character development is great but what the book REALLY needs is for Reshma to MURDER SOMEONE!!!

...it is possible that murder is not the answer. (Or maybe it is!)

(There is also a brief period during which Reshma contemplates ending her novel by riding off on a unicorn and becoming a queen of fantasyland, BUT ALAS that option is rejected relatively quickly.)

Anyway, Reshma, as I have said, is awful, and the book, like her, is intense and funny and weirdly touching and ruthless and consistently unexpected, and knows all the rules and exactly when to break them, and I love it very much and I am so glad it is finally out in a form that other people can purchase and read.