Author: Kaavya ViswanathanPublished: Alloy Entertainment 2006
Number of Pages: 314
Review: Opal Mehta is the nerd you knew in high school, the nerd who always dreamed of getting into the top university of her country, (in Opal’s case Harvard) and the nerd who would do anything to secure an admission to that particular university. Basically Opal Mehta is me. However, unlike Opal I didn’t sacrifice who I am to ensure myself a spot at UofT.
Opal is conniving and manipulative and assertive and ambitious, all qualities I utterly loved about this character. It was her immaturity and her amateurish behaviour that drove me into insanity. The narration, in first person, was unbearable at times. It was like reading the high school version of The Devil Wears Prada. I could not believe I’d picked another book to read that focused primarily on clothes and television shows and pop culture. This is the crap that our youths are exposed to today that makes authors “think” they can “appeal” to the masses by adding juvenile and atrocious allusions to their writing. Does it help that the author herself is a youth? Well I could cut her some slack but if you consider yourself a successful and professional writer, one that is good enough to be published, then you better write a novel that is worth the ink on paper and this novel was not one of them.
It primarily deals with a Desi family living in New Jersey: Opal, and her two annoying and dauntingly immature and pervasive parents, Amal and Meena Mehta. Opal has the highest GPA in her school and yet when she goes to her interview she is told that they’re not just looking for a GPA but an all-around well rounded person. How crushed she was to find out that her GPA didn’t matter if she was an android and thus began her mission of HOWGAL: How Opal Will Get A Life, in which she were to become popular by befriending the Haute Bitchez, get a boy to kiss her and turn into a wild child so that Harvard will accept her. Now I don’t know about the majority of teen students out there today, but in my school there were no popular students, everybody got along with everybody and nobody in University cares if you were the hottest person on the cheer-leading squad. University and the real world is not a popularity contest.
Now being from a dominant Indian culture I was expecting to find this book loaded with familiar cultural references, thus when I saw that during the Hindu festival of Diwali her family ordered mutton curry to serve, disgusted me. What happened to fasting and respecting the religion enough to not eat meat? And her father was really annoying with his “ghetto” talk and constant pressure he was putting on the poor teenager -no wonder she went insane- kind of like the pressure I get from my parents about Med School.
Anyways, back to the book… Opal clearly doesn’t love the fact that she is from an Indian family. The way she dismisses her aunties and uncles, the way she describes the parties and festivals, the way she bluntly told her dad she will not play Indian music at her party, the fact that she doesn’t even like the FOOD… it shows her disdain towards her culture. What I did like about her though was her physics ability. At least she was science smart… and the whole thing with the Fermeculi formula was very smart on the author’s part.
Although the book was written for teenagers, I had expected more from it. I thought it resembled Mean Girls almost to the point of them being indistinguishable from one another, but just almost. The message was common, the plot line predictable and in the words of a teenager “it’s all been done!” The buzz behind it when it first came out was undeserving and the fact that the novel was practically plagiarized just goes to show that the novel isn’t worth the ink on paper. I guess the only other thing I can say is: read it on your own discretion.
Happy Reading!!!
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