10 Things I Hate About Pinky, by Sandhya Menon, is a companion novel to When Dimple Met Rishi and There’s Something About Sweetie, though you don’t have to have read either of those to read it. Pinky Kumar is a social justice warrior who has a bad relationship with her mother, who views her as rebellious and disrespectful. After being falsely accused of accidentally starting a fire, she claims to have a boyfriend that her mother would approve of. Pinky and Samir Jha know each other through their mutual friend Ashish (one of the protagonists of There’s Something About Sweetie), so when his law internship in Washington, DC is cancelled the day it’s supposed to start, Pinky invites him to her vacation house to pretend to be her boyfriend in exchange for the chance to impress her mother, a famous lawyer.

Yes, this is another book with the fake-dating to real-dating cliche, but it is the fake-relationship trope at it’s best. For once the set-up to this sort of plot actually makes sense. There’s also enough subplots, particularly in regards to Pinky’s relationship with her mother and the news that the butterfly preserve, a fixture of the town, is going to be torn down. The plot, rather than feeling contrived, as this sort of story often does, feels dynamic and natural.

Pinky Kumar, one of the protagonists, considers herself to be a social justice warrior, and champions a wide variety of causes, from helping to make trailers for GoFundMe campaigns to rehabilitating a possum she finds over the course of the book until she can find an animal preserve for it. She is unapologetically herself, and a compelling narrator. Her relationship with her mother is one of the most interesting parts of her character; she feels her mother has never accepted her for who she is, so she sometimes purposefully picks fights with her so at least her mother’s displeasure is on Pinky’s own terms. She begins to find out why her mother reacts the way she does to Pinky’s actions as she learns more about her past over the course of the book.

Samir Jha, the other protagonist, has grown up rigidly scheduling his life, a habit he learned when his mother got cancer when he was 10 and he was the only person to keep track of all of her appointments for her treatment. Since then she had been very overprotective of him. He had thought that his internship would finally be a chance for his life to begin away from his mother’s constant supervision, but that falls through he becomes Pinky’s fake boyfriend. He is the opposite of Pinky in many ways, though they find unexpected similarities as they grow closer. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked his character in this, because I hadn’t really liked him in There’s Something About Sweetie. He’s far from my favorite of Menon’s protagonists (I preferred both Rishi and Ashish, though I like him better than, though I like Samir far better than Sahil, from From Twinkle, With Love), but he’s still an enjoyable narrator and grew on me over the course of the book.

There are plenty of other characters that are for the most part well-fleshed-out and multi-dimensional, though Pinky and Samir are definitely the most significant ones. Dolly, Pinky’s cousin, is one notable exception in that she is very involved in much of the plot. I have to confess that I didn’t really like her; her entire character was basically “I’ve always been the perfectly behaved daughter my parents expected, but I want to do something rebellious,” which I grew weary of as the book went on. She also felt relatively insignificant for the amount of presence she had in the book. Regardless, my issue with her wasn’t so much that I disliked her, but that she felt bland and like she wasn’t really adding anything to the book.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I was expecting nothing less, considering that I have really liked all of the other Menon books that I have read. I raced through it in one sitting, with the plot being lively enough to keep me going for several hours. The relationship between Pinky and Samir felt natural and compelling. My only two issues with the book are the large presence that Dolly plays, which I’ve already discussed, and the fact that an obstacle is tossed in after the two have already gotten together that feels straight out of a certain moment in Ross and Rachel’s relationship from Friends, but which is also so unnecessary to the overall plot of the story that I don’t really understand why it is there at all. Regardless, I give this book 4 stars, since those are my only two issues with it.