Sarah Thankam Mathews

In a long line of books about angsty twenty-somethings trying to find themselves and figure out life, Sarah Thankam Mathews delivers one that steps out of the crowd with All This Could Be Different. Sneha has just moved to Milwaukee for her first job out of college and she wants all of the normal things — success at work, friends, and a girlfriend — but finds it all very difficult to navigate as she is burdened with family secrets and personal issues. Mathews separates herself from so show more many similar themed novels with interesting characters and sparkling prose that make them leap from the page with believability, and enough plot to keep things moving. All This Could Be Different is an excellent novel that explores themes of LGBTQ+, friendship, relationships, family, and racial justice. show less

the writing here is excellent, just so good. i really liked this story of just living after college and what that's like. throw in immigration status, queerness, and poverty, and it's a really worthwhile read. i really like that, even though a central relationship in the book is romantic, that this really is more about friendship than any other relationships. that i know what i need to about these characters, but can't really picture any of them. that sneha doesn't end up with marina at the show more end, that the house that tig finds for their grand communal experiment isn't the one that they wanted but that they still made it happen. that so much is going on in this book and talked about, while the plot isn't the main thing at all. show less

Three quarters misery, with a reversal of fortune in the end, and the gap between is too painful to make for an enjoyable read. After graduation, Sneha moves to Milwaukee for a seemingly well-paying and secure consulting job and is even able to bring in her dudebro Thom (who, hilariously, treats Sneha just like she's him), and she falls in love with a complicated woman. When everything goes sour, her devoted friends try and pull her through, but Sneha folds and allows her miserable landlord show more and cheating boss to shatter her life. Oh, and yeah, she's remains closeted to her unknowing family back in India. The plunge to the bottom includes some rough and exploitative sexual encounters, and her strongest advocate is a woman she isn't attracted to but who becomes her lifesaver to sanity. In the altogether, Sneha's fall is too long-lasting and her rise is given short shrift. show less

fiction - 22 y.o. Sneha struggles with making/keeping friends and especially with meeting women for dating/casual hookups in Milwaukee, WI (late 2000s?) with trips to India and D.C.. Her parents had returned to India when she was 17 (and she hasn't forgiven them for leaving her), but she has managed to finish college and even find a consulting job that will hopefully secure her green card for staying in the US.
Note: S. is a very sexual person so some parts of this get pretty graphic; she is show more often critical of other queers, women and people of color, which causes some of the tension in the plot--also, just about every main character in here has lived through multiple personal traumas (drug addiction, alcoholism, traumatic loss of parents, the list goes on) which isn't exactly unlikely but it does make this combination of characters more complicated than I'm used to finding in a novel. The story is interesting but can be more intense than you're looking for sometimes, but I liked that she got to work through her multiple, complicated issues with her friends and with her parents. show less