I’ve been running through a spate of bookring books via BookCrossing lately, and my latest read is no exception. (Un)arranged Marriage is a YA novel written from the perspective of a Punjabi teenager growing up in England, dealing with his family’s racism and his own impending forced marriage. Manjit (or Manny, as he prefers to to be called), is a product of his modern, Western environment, with a black boy as his best friend and a white girl as his love interest, and wants to attend university – all of which are anathema to his father’s traditional, working class sensibilities. How Manny faces and ultimately escapes his dubious fate is an adventure, at times harrowing, hilarious, and heartbreaking.

I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of the modern clash with the traditional from the boy’s point of view, since most books I find that deal with this topic are written from the female perspective. What I didn’t enjoy so much was the constant slang, dialect, and accents that were incorporated into seemingly every bit of dialogue between Manny and his friends – it was cumbersome and awkward, and I think for the most part, unnecessary.