The second book in the Dimple and Rishi universe and my third time reading Menon's work, There's Something About Sweetie pulls no punches. Menon's intersectional feminist vision and brilliant wordcraft shine in this fat-positive novel about proving yourself.

Months after the events of the first book, Dimple and Rishi are more in love than ever. Ashish and Celia, meanwhile, are...decidedly not. After she cheats on him with a college dudebro, Ashish's heart snaps in half. With a broken heart, nothing else works: not basketball, not grades, and definitely not his dating skills. Desperate, he decides to do something he's never done before: ask his parents for help.

Sweetie is the second fastest high schooler in the state of California, earns stellar grades, and has very good friends, but none of that matters to her mother. All her mother sees is that her daughter is fat. She harps on it all day, every day, and the last straw is when Amma turns down a dating contract from Ashish's mother, saying that such a handsome, talented son like Ashish would never date a fat girl. Determined to prove her mother wrong, Sweetie accepts the proposal herself, and she and Ashish embark on a dating journey like no other.

While I don't consider myself skinny, I have little experience with fatphobia. For me, Menon's work was eye-opening to the twisted illogic fat people can be subjected to, and oof, it is sinister. At times I had to put the book down and breathe for a moment to re-orient myself. It's definitely the darkest theme Menon has tackled so far in her work, and the urgent need for body positivity and acceptance are a running theme.

As far as the romance, There's Something About Sweetie holds Menon's trademark sparkle and fluff. I adored Sweetie and Ashish together, in all their trope-y goodness. The friend and parent characters are refreshingly well-developed, and I can tell Menon is truly invested in this world now. I'm still left dazzled and wondering how Menon pulls off her quick POV switches with such grace and ease.

My only quibble is something probably only readers who have raced through the series like me would ever complain about. Despite/whatever the professed interests of the protagonists, the plot obstacles always seem to come back to theater performances. In From Twinkle, With Love, that worked perfectly since Twinkle is a director. In When Dimple Met Rishi, it was a little awkward because the setting was a coding camp, and all the coding happened off-screen, yanno, just, ah, over there. In There's Something About Sweetie I was really expecting a track meet or a basketball game to be a major plot point since Ashish is a basketball player and Sweetie is track star. It's a Big Thing that Sweetie is fat and an athlete, so it would make sense that tension would gather there. Plus, researching high school athletics is less daunting than high caliber mobile app creation. Instead, the climax takes place at a concert fundraiser for Sweetie's track jerseys. On the one hand, it's cool that a book series is depicting STEM majors and athletes with varied interests. The fact that Dimple likes coding and Sweetie likes running doesn't exclude ALSO liking dancing and singing. Three books in though, it's weird that Menon isn't just letting herself write about the theater she so clearly loves. It might be because there are so few books about Indian American women, so she feels the need to spread the representation? I don't know. Again, this is only a quibble and maybe I just shouldn't read three contemporary romance novels in a row, haha.

All and all, There's Something About Sweetie is a lovely, much needed book. Read it, read it, read it.