RANI CHOUDHURY MUST DIE

Two Bangladeshi Irish teens reluctantly team up to enact justice on the boy who’s cheating on both of them.

It’s bad enough that Meghna Rahman’s boyfriend, Zak Sardar, has been seeing another girl, but why did it have to be her former best friend, Rani Choudhury? As if Rani doesn’t already have it all: She’s pretty, rich, smart, and accomplished, as Meghna’s parents constantly remind her. Once Meghna and Rani realize that Zak has played them both for fools, however, the two STEM-minded teens devise a revenge plot—they’ll develop an app to “revolutionize relationships” by tracking a suspected cheater’s digital footprint. Zak will be their case study when they present it at the upcoming European Young Scientist Exhibition. Since team members can be given individual awards, Meghna also secretly hopes to impress the judges enough to finally do better than Rani. But working together isn’t easy; their closeness brings repressed vulnerabilities in their relationship to the forefront. Is there something more to the long-standing tension between them? Will teaming up only drive them even further apart—or will exposing their backstabbing boyfriend bring them much, much closer together? The science fair setting provides a platform for the author to thoughtfully examine issues surrounding women of color in science and technology. The shared Bangladeshi background of Meghna, Rani, and Zak also offers room for frank and insightful discussions of cultural familial expectations and generational conflict.

An unconventional and original revenge story with a sweet Sapphic romance.