'Jazz in Love' - Neesha Meminger

'Jazz in Love’ begins with Future Stars and Leaders super student Jasbir Dhatt (Jazz to herself and her friends, but not to her conservative Sikh parents) explaining to her friend Cindy why being seen hugging her long time male friend Jeeves is such a big deal. The Community has reported Jazz’s hugging antics to her parents, who are concerned that she’s been seen being affectionate with a man who isn’t related to her. Jazz’s mother doesn’t react in an extreme way as she trusts her daughter, but she is concerned about the way others will see Jazz and how this might affect her chances of marrying into a good Sikh family later in life. She decides that it’s time for her to help eighteen year old Jazz start looking for an appropriate life partner. She presents her daughter with suitable candidates’ encyclopaedic files and makes the case that Jazz is lucky, because her parents will let her pick a match for herself, and then wait until she has finished college before helping her to plan the marriage.

Jazz’s reaction to this is the same as any teenagers would be if their parents said ‘We know this person we think you should go out with.’, a mixture of shock, pouting and bargaining. She eventually agrees to meet a boy who has been recommended by her Auntie Mindo. He’s a suitably Indian boy who lives (far away) in Canada and he looks kind of cute in his file photos. If Jazz meets him her mother will back off about bombarding her with files and files of suitable matches.

When she meets Gurmit, in a designated coffee shop but at least a few streets away from where their mothers are discussing them, he’s quick to explain that he’s not keen on the guided dating idea either because he’s gay. The reason his parents are so keen to find him a life partner is because he hasn’t shown enough interest in women (while Jazz is being chivvied because she’s supposed to be showing too much interest). He’s hoping that being in an accelerated academic program, Jazz will be more understanding than other Indian girls and make a deal to pretend they’ve hit it off and it turns out he’s right.

It’s not surprising that, after Jazz gets over her shock at meeting a gay Indian boy, she jumps at this offer. Jazz’s has a strong, sometimes over powering interest in boys and romance, but she’s also naturally smart and a strong academic. While the book makes little specific reference to any individual interests prompted by her studies, Jazz uses her problem solving skills to take advantage of any romantic opportunity that might improve the happiness of her or anyone else’s life. In Chapter One we see her wondering how the British managed to ‘weasel out of’ arranged marriages while Indian society clings on to the idea and by Chapter Five she’s taking the chance offered by Gurmit’s deal to make sure that both of them can get more freedom from their parents, allowing them to pursue other, non-arranged, romantic partners. Soon she’s also working on a plan to help her Auntie Kinder beat her abusive ex-husbands legal challenges, by reuniting her with a lost love. Finally she spends time making the hot, new West Indian guy Tyler R notice her, in a bid to become freer like her friends who don’t have such strict cultural rules to follow. Her idea that romance can solve any problem may be naïve, but the ways she goes about putting her idea into practise show off her canny, inventive brains. She has the practical abilities to create a plan and carry it off, even if the goal of that plan is a bit flawed to begin with.

‘Jazz in Love’ is such a fun book. Jazz has an enthusiastic, fun voice that sounds very natural and injects the book with a lot of energy:

‘OH. MY. GAAAAWWWWD. Tyler R touched me. He TOUCHED me!!!! I was on my way out the door to meet Cindy and her sisters for lunch at Tony’s Diner, when I realized I’d forgotten my wallet in my jacket pocket. I told Cindy I’d catch up with them and ran to my locker to grab aforementioned wallet.

Out of nowhere, I felt these warm fingers on my elbow. TYLER R.’s fingers (Shudder). I totally died. Right there.’

Her voice reminds me of books I used to enjoy when I was a teenager, with boy crazy girls running around creating complicated plans to bring true love their way and lots of loud, happy conversations over boys, between best girl friends. The trouble with boy crazy books is that often they come with a heap of unremarked girl hatred and built in simplifications about certain types of girls. In ‘Jazz in Love’ Meminger makes a point of including realistic, flawed attitudes directed from the main female characters towards other girls, for example:

‘ ”Why would Tyler R. want to talk to me? He has his pick of the entire school. Every butt-crack-baring, Juicy-bottomed, cantaloupe-boobed…”

“Don’t forget ditzy…” said Cindy.

“…hair-tossing hoochie he could ever want,” '

but she has other characters show just how flawed these ideas are, like when Toni responds with ‘ “I hate when members of my gender do this. Not only did you two unfairly and unjustly put down all of these women, but you…you completely devalued yourself and your best qualities.” ' (although I should mention that this didactic style can feel forced in a few places) . I also find it freakin’ delightful to see a book with academic, female main characters, that doesn’t feature a mean girl enemy as a romantic competitor. This books energy is directed at describing full on female friendships and that means there just isn’t enough space for simplistic girl squaring off over a man.

I think one of my favourite parts of this book is watching Jazz interact with her friends(male and female), showing off her joyful, genuine spirit. Despite hatching a momentous, parent fooling plan with Gurmit she really doesn’t know him at all, but she spends time listening to him talk about his romance with a boy named Josh and is genuinely excited for him. Her relationships with her friends are the point that she revolves around. Although the way she throws herself into such a singular involvement in her relationship with Tyler R means she makes mistakes with her friends she genuinely cares about these friendships.

Meminger works hard to create individual personalities for all these friends, doing all the little intricate writerly things that implicitly show what a character is like, for example choosing words that express parts of a characters mood and personality. Saying that Cindy ‘bounces’ away shows her romantic optimism and her general cheerful personality, in a subtler way than Jazz commenting that Cindy is optimistic and cheerful. Meminger captures her characters tone and personality by choosing the right style of dialogue for each person and the descriptors she chooses to surround their dialogue are often used to add more detail to the readers understanding of a character, for example Cindy and Jazz are the kind of people who flourish and shriek, showing that they’re flamboyant and enthusiastic. These are all the little things that build a character.

So, it’s strange to realise that Meminger has left large gaps in some of her characters, missing out the big, obvious details that would give readers more detail about a character. Taking Cindy as an example, readers learn quite a bit about the lives that Cindy is in (she has a boyfriend called Wes, her mother is divorced etc) but little about Cindy’s inner life. The external manifestations of her inner thoughts are missing in this book. Everyone has dreams and interests, but Cindy’s are never mentioned. She gets called academically brilliant as do the rest of the FSL characters, but we don’t see any goals, or interests mentioned. Readers can gather plenty about her personality from the subtle touches I’ve described above, but looking at Cindy’s surface presentation she appears a much blanker character than she actually is.

Cindy’s lack of obvious interests is especially odd, because Meminger does such a good job of making sure that some of Cindy’s sister’s internal lives are reflected. Maybe their interests and dreams get to appear in an obvious way because they serve Jazz’s story and the book at large, whereas Cindy’s wouldn’t. Mary’s disappointing time as a PA on a tv station lets Jazz find connection when she needs them and feminist Toni provides corrective to Jazz’s thoughts on bindibos . To further Jazz’s Cindy needs to be a smart girl and a solid friend who is interested in boys. Nothing else is required of her. However, Jazz’s story doesn’t gain anything from Jeeves interest in basketball, but it’s mentioned a few times. It seems that Cindy missed out on this more obvious form of characterisation for no story related reason, despite being, like all the other characters, extremely well developed in more subtle ways.

There are fun times to be had with Jazz as she navigates her way through love and the way different cultures approach forming a romantic partnership. I’d like to thank Neesha Meminger for sending me a copy of her new, self-published novel, which for some bizarre reason couldn’t find a home with an established publisher despite the authors previously successful novel (published by Margaret K McElderry) ‘Shine, Coconut Moon’. I’m looking forward to going back and reading that book next.

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