The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life Of Sunita Sen

She was an all-American girl . . . until they showed up.

Meet Sunita Sen. She likes to write, loves to play tennis, and gets swept away every time she watches the movie Casablanca (especially when she imagines Michael Morrison in the lead role). Everything is going just fine for Sunita—then they come from India to stay with her family. Her grandparents, that is. Suddenly, her blossoming romance with Michael comes crashing to an end and her mother starts acting like some kind of ideal Indian woman.

Star-spangled, saree-spangled .. . Sunita doesn't know how to describe her life anymore. Why couldn't she be 100 percent Indian, like those cousins her grandmother brags about? Or American—really American, like Michael, or her best friend, Liz? Maybe then life would be less complicated.