Counting Down With You by Tashie Bhuiyan

Rating: 1'white boy savior who is totally not a savior guys Karina is not a princess waiting for a knight in shining armor okay this is about her inner strength and not a white boy romance saving her' out of 5

Upon finishing this book, I have one all-consuming question: why am I supposed to care about any of this?

Counting Down With You is written by Tashie Bhuiyan, who is yet another of these recent YA authors who get book deals before they get feedback on their first college essays. Perhaps this is why the main conflict of this book is so toothless yet so self-centered. Youth and a lack of life experience don’t necessarily go hand in hand, but it is hard not to attribute the problems of this book to Ms Bhuiyan’s youth. I appreciate the need for stories that focus on small conflicts, but the protagonist’s conflict is presented like it is the end of the world, despite several mentions of other characters dealing with far, far worse.

This book follows Karina Ahmed, a Bangladeshi Muslim teenager in her junior year of high school. Karina’s parents want her to become a doctor, but she wants to pursue English and she is afraid of telling them. Karina’s teacher asks her to tutor this book’s version of the Rich White Boy Character Who Is Definitely Not A Knockoff Of The One Direction Man, Alistair “Ace” Clyde. White boy Ace is so concerned about his family discovering that he has a tutor that he announces to them that Karina is his girlfriend. For flimsy reasons, this lie must be told to the whole school for the span of a month. Karina agrees to this fake dating scheme because her parents are in Bangladesh for the month, so they will not find out, and because white boy Ace promises to buy her twelve books a week, and because…uh…he’s the rich white boy character who is definitely not a knockoff of the One Direction man, I suppose.

I would be here all day if I wrote everything that appalled me about this book (I could write a whole separate review on the poor prose), so I will focus on three aspects: conflict, the love interest, and Bengali literature.

CONFLICT

“Parents have expectations, child cannot or does not want to fulfill those expectations” is one of the oldest conflicts in any culture. It has been done a million times in a million ways and it will be done a million more times in a million more ways, so it shouldn’t be hard to do it well.

This book does not do it well. Karina wants to study English—but her parents want her to be a doctor and are generally unsupportive and restrictive—but her dadu is not like that—because her dadu’s daughter died as a child!—and Karina’s father might be more lax if not for her mother—but her mother is strict because her parents were strict!—and this is frustrating but don’t worry this doesn’t represent all Bangladeshi Muslim parents!

Everything related to the conflict is told to the reader directly, rather than showing it to us in a scene or trusting us to draw conclusions for ourselves. For example, when discussing Karina’s father and mother and dadu’s guardianship styles, the narration says

“Maybe the loss of his sister made him more restrictive, the same way that it made Dadu more lenient. People react to grief differently.

“I think being around my mom has furthered that restrictive behavior, since my maternal grandparents are a lot more strict than Dadu. Nanu and Nana have never been anything but kind to me, sending me gifts and the like, but I know they’re the reason Ma expects so much from me.”

This kind of direct explanation is common, and gives me the impression that I’m listening to a recording of a therapy session rather than reading a published novel.

Furthermore, the conflict does not arise until the end of the novel. Karina agonizes over telling her parents about what she wants to study for the entire novel, and it’s not until her parents return to America that she finally does so—and then everything is dramatized and resolved extremely quickly after that, which causes the conflict to lose any impact that it might have had. Why not have Karina tell her parents at the start of the novel, have the fallout ripple throughout the narrative, and finally reach its breaking point when they return?

There is also the issue of the conflict being the absolute least of the characters’ problems. In one scene, Karina references some of the issues facing her cousins: one cousin who was outed as bisexual and kicked out; another who was too feminine and had his clothes and makeup confiscated; another who was being punished for her Filipino boyfriend; another who was being barred from attending university away from home. Conflict is not a competition, but it’s hard to care about Karina wanting to study English at a college close to home when each of these cousins is dealing with far larger problems—especially when, despite Karina repeatedly saying that other people are dealing with far worse, she certainly acts like her problem is the end of the world.

A more generous reader might attribute Karina’s tendency to overexaggerate her problem to an attempt to accurately depict Karina’s anxiety. However, as someone whose Indian family suffers from a frankly hilarious number of mental disorders, most of which are not and never will be diagnosed, yet we all figure out how to survive anyway, I say: bas kar, yaar. Enough is enough. At some point, you gotta get over yourself. And wouldn’t some of Karina’s cousins have mental problems of their own, too, on top of the more severe external problems?

THE LOVE INTEREST

Karina and Ace’s relationship is a collection of romance novel/fanfic tropes that don’t ever manage to add up to…you know…romance. It’s impressive how much a book that goes on about Sparks and Infernos and Forest Fires can have such a lack of chemistry between its protagonist and love interest. All that fire and still nothing!

I was never on Wattpad, but I’ve watched enough videos making fun of the many movies that it spawned to have an idea of what Wattpad writing is like. This book is Wattpad writing in its purest form: romance that was decided by tropes and not what suits the characters; the lowest standards that you’ve ever seen for how a man should treat a woman; dialogue that sounds like it was crafted by an alien who learned human speech from Netflix original movies; and teenage boys with the physique and speech patterns of a twenty-eight year old man.

Ace does not act like a real boy. Not in the “he’s so wonderful it’s unreal” way but in the “has the author ever spoken to a sixteen year old straight white boy before” way. At one point, Ace creates a mixtape for Karina. I don’t know much about English-language music, so I showed the playlist to my friends who do, and the verdict was that this story would make far more sense if it turned out that Karina and Ace were actually gay, and this fake relationship was a vehicle through which the characters discovered this about themselves. Given that Karina often seems far more interested in compliments from girls than from her literal fake-boyfriend, I am inclined to agree.

The romantic scenes feel like a checklist. Paying for her sweets at the sweet shop? Check! Remembering her coffee order? Check! Helping her through an anxiety attack? Check! Double date with an almost-kiss? Check! Dinner at the boy’s house, followed by the reveal that he composed a song for her on the piano (of course he plays piano—what brooding teenage hero doesn’t, after Edward in Twilight?), followed by a first kiss? Check! None of these scenes is tailored to this couple. You could swap in any other couple and the scenes would remain the same, other than Karina wearing her mother’s Bangladeshi jewelry on their first dinner date, or the unintentionally comedic detail that the filet mignon is halal.

The timeline of this romance is another issue. It’s possible to create a believable romance in the span of a month, but it’s dependent on the genre. Historical or fantasy—sure. Contemporary high school? Not so much. It’s hard to buy stilted lines such as “There’s a spark in you, Karina Ahmed.…I want to light a match and send you up in flames. You’re a forest fire waiting to happen.” when you know that so far, Karina and Ace’s infrequent interactions have taken place 1. beneath the ever-so-flattering fluorescent lighting of a high school, or 2. inside of a sweet shop (in the afternoon, no less—maybe it’s the “worked with the public and took public transit during Covid” in me talking, but if I’d be more worried about the hygiene of such a place toward the end of the day, rather than the romance. Do you know how many times I’ve seen a child stick their hand into their mouth then directly onto a counter? Don’t ask. I don’t want to talk about it).

As if to preempt any readers’ complaints related to the speed of this romance, Karina mentions a few times that it’s too soon to feel strongly, that Ace can’t love her, and so on. These are always ruined, however, by her friends’ insistence that there is something there after all, and by the intensity of Karina’s feelings towards Ace, and by the references to Ace wanting a “future” with Karina beyond junior year/junior prom.

To be fair, I did observe this kind of intensity from straight friends and acquaintances in high school, so it might seem absurd only to me. So who knows. Maybe I’m just a dumb lesbian.

BENGALI LITERATURE

Many articulate reviewers have addressed the ignorant way that Bangladesh and Islam are portrayed in this book, so I want to dedicate this section to what I haven’t seen mentioned. Namely: why the hell a story about a Bangladeshi girl who loves literature would NEVER MENTION A SINGLE PIECE OF BENGALI LITERATURE.

(For clarification, I will use ‘Bengali’ as I am referring to the language, not the authors’ country of origin)

The Bengali literary tradition is huge. You think ‘Bengali’ and you immediately think of prose and poetry. Rabindranath Tagore is of course well-known, but even someone like Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay should come to mind—even more so because Karina watches a Bollywood movie in this book (Kal Ho Naa Ho, which…well. I could write a whole essay on diaspora’s insistence on engaging with only specific kinds of Bollywood movies, and totally ignoring other languages’ film industries). Many Indian movies are based on Sarat Charat Chattopadhyay’s work—Parineeta for example—but a huge one is Devdas. Karina and her dadu watch Bollywood movies together—surely her dadu would have mentioned Devdas at least once, whether to praise or criticize the various adaptations?

Furthermore, why does Karina never discuss Bengali literature with her dadu? Her dadu is mentioned to be reading a Bengali newspaper and the Quran; does she have no taste for fiction or essays? They live in New York City, so they have access to an enormous library system that surely would carry books in multiple languages. Furthermore, Karina buys books, and is now getting a dozen a week from white boy Ace; at no point did she ask her dadu what sorts of books she read as a kid, and see if she could get them, either in Bengali for her dadu, or an English translation for herself? There is so much joy in sharing literature with your older relatives; I still remember my baba’s surprise when he saw me reading Akbar Birbal as a kid, or my own surprise when I found out that he’d read Lihaaf as a teenager because my dada subscribed to a magazine that printed previously banned stories.

Which brings me back to the first question of this review: why am I supposed to care about any of this, when it would be so easy to make me care about something else? Such as: Karina wants to study English literature, while her parents want her to become a doctor. Karina is disconnected and disillusioned with her heritage because of her parents’ rules. Through literature discussions with her dadu (and the twelve books a week that white boy Ace buys her, if we must keep the white boy Ace romance), Karina rediscovers a love for her heritage. She decides she wants to study Bengali literature and share this love with others like her. Her parents are convinced in part because they are so happy to see her truly engaged with her culture.

Only once does Karina mention the Bengali literary tradition, when she is listing things that she loves about her culture and says that she loves the poetry. However, this is never followed by any specific mention of a poem or author, which casts this statement in doubt. I’d wager a fair amount of money that Karina has never read a single word penned by a Bengali writer. And, I suspect, neither has Tashie Bhuiyan.

And isn’t that the real problem with all these painted-on “diversity” books? People writing about their culture when they refuse to engage with it beyond a Nice Grandmother and Delicious Food, then crying about cultural gatekeepers and “every experience is individual” whenever they receive criticism for it. And yet again, I say: bas kar, yaar. Enough is enough. At some point, you gotta get over yourself and read a damn book.