MONSOON SUMMER

With an athletic build, Jasmine “Jazz” Gardner barely resembles her petite, delicate Indian mother. She can understand why her best friend and partner of the Biz, which sells photo postcards with Berkeley, California, backgrounds to nostalgic hippies, probably has no interest in her as a girlfriend. Now she’s spending the summer with her family in Pune, India, while her mother sets up a women’s clinic at the orphanage from which she was adopted. After being robbed by a homeless woman working for the Biz, Jazz hesitates to get involved in charitable acts like her mother. Is it Monsoon Madness—magical rains that cause people to behave in peculiar ways—that drives Jazz to help an orphan girl who dreams of starting her own business rather than accept a marriage proposal by a man more than twice her age, confess her love to Steve, and accept her body as beautiful? Although the author’s altruistic messages are heavy-handed, she enlightens readers not familiar with the richness of Indian culture. In Bollywood fashion, she turns turmoil into happy endings. (Fiction. 12-15)