RADHA & JAI'S RECIPE FOR ROMANCE

Seventeen-year-old Radha Chopra has always loved kathak, a classical dance form from North India.

Because of her dedication and hard work, Indian American Radha is world famous—and burned out. She no longer knows if she’s dancing for joy or for her mother, Sujata Roy Chopra, who pressures Radha to excel so that she doesn’t experience the same regret she feels for leaving her own acclaimed dance career behind two decades before. When Radha refuses to compete in the finals at an international championship in London, her mother is furious. Although Radha is sure that her kathak career is over, she makes a deal with her mother: She will leave Chicago to spend her senior year at an arts academy in Princeton, New Jersey. If Radha works hard and gives dancing one more shot, Sujata promises that she can make her own decisions at the end of the year. Radha is sure that she will give up dance until she meets Jai Patel, a working-class Punjabi Gujarati American boy who is the captain of the school’s Bollywood dance team. Radha quickly falls for Jai—but is their romance enough to make her also fall for dancing all over again? This entertaining novel alternates between Jai’s and Radha’s third-person perspectives. Changes in their relationship, and between each of them and their immigrant families, are well paced, authentic, and page-turning. Both characters are well developed and easy to root for.

A perceptive and textured romance.