All This Could be Different

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Mathews, Sarah	4-week checkout	Due 05-21-2024
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Mathews, Sarah Thankam	4-week checkout	Due 03-21-2024

I -- They -- She -- We.
"From an exhilarating new voice comes a dazzling debut novel about an Indian-American immigrant building a life for herself in the Midwest--a brilliant and utterly absorbing story of love, friendship, and precarity in 21st century America. Graduating into the trough of yet another American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. However mind-numbing the work, her entry-level consulting job is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the check for her growing circle of friends in Milwaukee, send money home to her parents in India, and dare to envision a stable future for herself. She even begins dating who she has long wanted--women--and soon develops a crush on Marina, a beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But then, as quickly as it came together, Sneha's life begins to fall apart. Her job and apartment are both suddenly and maddeningly in jeopardy, and closely-guarded secrets and buried traumas resurface, sending her spiraling into shame and isolation. When a chance encounter with Marina ignites an electric romance, it looks like salvation--if only they can overcome the lie that threatens to undo the trust they've built. A novel of working lives, friendships, and self-discovery in flux, All This Could Be Different is a wry, intimate, and redemptive exploration of the freedom and fragility of youth, and what it means to devote oneself to others in search of a better world"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

brilliant novel featuring queer & collective-minded milwaukee submitted by katehutchens on June 11, 2023, 2:09pm This novel tells the story of a queer South Asian millennial woman entering the "professional" (i.e., email & spreadsheet-based) workforce in the time after Occupy but before Black Lives Matter and marriage equality. The emotional and material struggles of the protagonist and her friends/family face are so compelling because it's so ambiguous - to the characters and to the reader - who is responsible for creating or changing the situations and conditions in their lives. I spent this whole book thinking deeply about where the personal and the social and the political meet when we make our big and small choices. I loved the narrator, even though i didn't always like her. I very much liked all the other characters who loved her.