Rani Choudhury Must Die loves a questionable ethic!

 

Now not to brag, but my copy of Rani Choudhry Must Die by Adiba Jaigirdar that I’m talking about today is signed. I say that like I got it specially and that there weren’t just a few signed copies for sale in the shop I bought it from. I will also say, Adiba Jaigirdar is one of those authors that I think I just like the style of the writing. Because you know how books with sometimes have an “also by x author”? I’ve read all but one of Jaigirdar’s books according to that list.

Anyway, the blurb says that Meghna and Rani used to be friends. Now they’re bitter rivals. Or are they? When Meghna fails to make it to the final round of a competition, but her boyfriend Zak and her rival Rani do, she thinks things can’t get much worse. Until she discovers Zak has been cheating on her. With Rani. Rani is bold and beautiful. Rani is scheming and evil. Rani MUST die. Except… maybe Rani is a victim too? Determined to expose Zak as the lying cheat he is, Meghna and Rani forge a reluctant truce. But as the two girls grow close, they begin to question their feelings for one another and why they ever became enemies in the first place…

So in the first chapter, Meghna sneaks out of her house to go and meet Zak, her Zak, that she’s been selected for the Young Scientist Exhibition, and while they’re talking, he sort of warns her about disappointment since Rani is also going to be there. The book then pops over to Rani’s POV, we are going dual POV in this mug, to where she’s having a meal with Zak’s family. And to the reader, she mentions that she likes him as a friend just fine, but she doesn’t know if she likes him in that way. Going on from there, there’s this huge dawat that both Rani and Meghna are attending, but Meghns doesn’t particularly want to be there after the whole community practically shunned her and her family after her father’s company went bankrupt. Despite the fact Meghna tells the reader that that’s what happened, everyone in the community seemed to think that her father had some shady dealings going on in his company, and that’s what made the whole thing blow up. So that did leave me wanting to know what actually happened with the company. I know that’s not the point of the book, but I’m nosy and want to know.

The girls come up with the plan to beat Zak at the European leg of the science exhibition that both Rani and Zak made it to, because there’s a rule saying teams can enter. Meghna ends up finding out that there’s an option for an individual prize as well as the team one, so she figures she can take down Rani with that too. While they’re in the early stages of this, one of Rani’s siblings mentioned, since Meghna is back in Rani’s life, that, or questioned, whether Rani remembered how Meghna broke her heart. And with Meghna in her POV plotting to take Rani down, you could see that was definitely leading up to Rani getting hurt again – potentially in the same way she was in the first. With how Rani mentioned that she didn’t know if she had romantic type of feelings when it came to Zak, but she had her heart broken by Meghna, I took that to presume that she had some kind of feelings towards Meghna.

There’s a moment when Rani and Zak are sat at a dawat together and they’re showing each other the apps they made for the Irish part of the science exhibition. Rani is fully just using it so she can download the app that she and Meghna made onto his phone, but he says that her language one was good, not something that he’d have made, and unique. And that felt so slimy to me. I know Zak was cheating on both the girls but referring to Rani’s app as unique in that sense felt very slimy. Like it was a compliment but very backhanded.

Speaking of apps, though. The two, after the Irish part of the scientist exhibition, team up and make this other app that they call C.A.T. – catch a two-timer. Now I got the concept, the idea of the app was to help people catch their cheating partner, and to then help them deal with it with the digital therapist that was on the app. Now, I understood why they made it – obviously with the two of them being cheated on by the same person – but the way it worked was so sus. It had to be downloaded onto the user’s phone, and then also on the phone of the person suspected to be cheating. And the girls definitely do mention the ethics of this app, but they more or less just say a quick, “Yeah, we know it’s suspicious”, and then that’s about it. Like mama? The invasion of privacy of it all. I’m not going to spoil how the two of them do in the European leg of the exhibition, but they made it all the way to the European leg. And… call me XG with the way that ‘Something Ain’t Right’, like huh? Why did no one question that? It’s one of those things where I feel like you kind of have to suspend your disbelief and just tell yourself, “What the hell, sure”, for it all to be okay.

Between the two POVs, I definitely liked Rani more than I did Meghna. The two of them were obviously going through very different things, even through being cheated on. Meghna had so much more freedom than Rani did, even with their parents. But with that freedom, it almost felt like Meghna took that and almost started acting wrong with Rani. The number of times that it felt like there was displaced negativity towards Rani. There were just times where Meghna was so horrible to Rani and she just didn’t do anything wrong, like Meghna was upset about something else, and somehow Rani would be the one to be blamed for it. And in that vein, Rani was fine. Honestly, she seemed very mature for who she was. To say that she spent so much of the book wrestling with the way she felt and how her parents wanted her life to go – the number of times they wanted her to grow up to be good for a man, instead of just growing up to be good, crusty – that I’m surprised she managed to hold herself together so well.

This was another book that fell prey to the fact that I liked it and that was about it. There was nothing egregiously wrong with it, but there was nothing that blasted my wig off either. It’s another one of those that I have just ended up comparing it to Jaigirdar’s other books, and there are other books from her that I’ve just enjoyed more.

Okay, bye!