Gita Desai Is Not Here to Shut Up

From Morris Award finalist Sonia Patel comes a sharply written YA about a girl grappling with a dark, painful secret from her past, perfect for fans of All My Rage and The Way I Used to Be.

It’s eighteen-year-old Gita Desai’s first year at Stanford, and the fact that she’s here and not already married off by her traditional Gujarati parents is a miracle. She’s determined to death-grip her good-girl, model student rep all the way to med school, which means no social life or standing out in any way. Should be easy: If there’s one thing she’s learned from her family, it’s how to chup-re--to ＂shut up,＂ fade into the background. But when childhood memories of her aunt’s desertion and her then-uncle’s best friend resurface, Gita ends up ditching the books night after night in favor of partying and hooking up with strangers. Still, nothing can stop the little voice growing louder and louder inside her that says something is wrong. . . . And the only way she can burst forward is to stop shutting up about the past.

＂Funny, messy, gut-wrenching.＂--Kirkus Reviews

Sonia Patel’s break-out novel, Rani Patel in Full Effect, was a finalist for the Morris Award, a YALSA and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2016, and received four-starred reviews. Her subsequent YA novels Jaya and Rasa and Bloody Seoul both received the In the Margins Book Award and very strong praise. As a child and adolescent psychiatrist trained at Stanford University and the University of Hawaii, Patel has spent over twenty years providing psychotherapy to children and their families. She lives in Honolulu with her husband and teenage son, and misses her daughter who’s away at college.