A Wallflower Blooms

From Twinkle, With Love by Sandhya Menon

Read by Soneela Nankani and Vikas Adam

Publication Date: May 22, 2018

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.

I had a lot of mixed feelings about this book.  There were times that I really liked it and found it just as fun and adorable as When Dimple Met Rishi.  But then Twinkle would do something that just irritated the heck out of me, and I just wanted to sit her down and give her a strong talking to, or you know slap her till she came to her senses. But if you can stick it through with Twinkle, she does get better and the ending scene with Sahil is just so adorable, that I forgave her all of her bad moments. 

So Twinkle was someone I could relate to at the beginning.  She was a typical teen, whose best friend, Maddie, was slipping away from her, her family didn’t seem to understand her, and the boy of her dreams doesn’t know she exists.  But then things start to turn around for her when her crush’s brother convinces her to make a film with him.  She starts to hang around with Sahil and his friends and things begin to get better.  Kids want to be in their film, including Maddie and some of her new friends.  But Twinkle soon becomes stuck in wallflower mode, and can’t see that things are getting better.  She has set her hopes on Neil and her getting together to make everything better.  In the mean time she can’t see how right things are going for her and she starts to become a bit of a bitch.  It was at this point that I thought about quitting the book.  But I stuck it out with the hope that Twinkle would come around and she does. 

I also stuck with the book because of Sahil, he was just to adorable to abandon.  Now he also had some issues that I just wanted to tell him to wake up about, but for the most part he was the perfect guy for Twinkle.  His hang ups came in the form of always being in the shadow of his superstar twin.  But I could see how that shaped who he was.  I also enjoyed his texts with his friends that were sprinkled through out the book.

The over all plot of the story was good, though maybe a little long.  There were some parts that were a bit draggy.  Twinkle really does go through a lot in this book and has some harsh realities to deal with, but that is typical of these kinds of books.   I also didn’t like the final chapter, it just seemed a little to unrealistic to me, that her film would garner that much attention right after the showing at her school.  Both of the readers did an excellent job.  I really liked their voices and their spot on emotions for these two kids.  

This book was a little bit of a let down after Dimple, but it is still worth it if you can put up with Twinkle when she starts to behave badly.