![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Kindred to Brandon Taylor’s stellar Real Life(2020), this novel burrows deep. Her debut novel, All This Could Be Different, was a finalist for the 2022. Recounting this heady time a decade or so later, Sneha is a magnetic teller of her tale of finding love, growing up, and summoning the power to change-and choose-her life. Sarah Thankam Mathews is an Indian-American author, novelist, and organizer. Sarah Thankam Mathews: I worked on another book for seven years before All This Could Be Different, and I threw it away. The distance does nothing to diminish the pressure only-child Sneha feels to make something of herself, nor her constant low-grade fear that they would never accept that she’s queer-a fear she extinguishes with brutal force after her plan to sleep around fails and she falls for Marina. As to her family of origin and the oceans now separating them, there was American-Dream success before there was a complete undoing, before Sneha’s parents did not refuse the money she wired home to India. Sneha, narrator of Mathews’ polished debut, just graduated college and landed in Milwaukee, “a rusted city where I had nobody, parents two oceans away.” Between long days working her consulting job in change management (“I should have majored in Microsoft Excel.”), Sneha amasses fine furniture for her paid-for apartment (negotiated into her contract), surfs the apps, and finds herself in a family of friends, who are a band of warm secondary characters, especially the inimitable Tig. ![]()
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