Love Craves Cardamom (Love in Translation, 2) - Softcover

Avachat, Aashna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593571584 ISBN 13: 9780593571583

Verlag: Random House Children's Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

An aspiring teen art curator who’s sworn off love spends a semester in India, where the first boy to give her butterflies again has a royally surprising secret—part of the international Love in Translation series of standalone YA romances.

“A swoon-worthy romance about following your heart. I absolutely adored this book.” —Ann Liang, New York Times bestselling author of I Hope This Doesn’t Find You

Archana Dhawan wants a boy-free zone this semester abroad. Fresh off a breakup, she’s headed to Rajasthan, India—her parents’ homeland—determined to find herself and thrive at her dream art museum internship. No drama. No distractions.

Alas, the universe is trying to tempt her. On day one, she meets the hottest boy on the train. Soon after, she runs into him again at work. Not only is the museum tied to a palace, but the cute guy, Shiv, is a royal gardener! 

As he takes her to the most gorgeous local spots, their undeniable chemistry grows. Then Archi gets shocking news: Shiv is not who he seems. Now she’s left wondering—was this brush with love the beginning of something warm and complex or just another bittersweet end?

The swoony Love in Translation romances can be read together or separately:
LOVE REQUIRES CHOCOLATE • LOVE CRAVES CARDAMOM

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Aashna Avachat

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Boy-Free January

Holy hell, I never knew I could be this jet-lagged.

Twenty-two hours from the airport in Washington, D.C., to Delhi, India, then two nights at a family friend’s home, and now a long train ride to Jaipur, Rajasthan. If I fall asleep and miss my stop, my mother is going to kill me. And I wouldn’t even blame her.

It’s not that I’m not excited about heading to Jaipur. I’ve been texting one of my best friends, Whitney, a new photo every two seconds--a green-and-yellow sign with the name of the station painted on it, the farmland we pass, the metropolis disappearing behind me . . . I stifle a yawn. At least I’m nearing the end of the journey. Any longer and I’ll show up in Jaipur looking like a zombie.

I stare out the window, focusing on the beautiful mountains in the distance to stop myself from nodding off. Thankfully, there aren’t that many people on the train, since the early morning commuter rush is over.

I’m on my own for the first time, and it’s so different from all the family trips we took when I was a little girl. Mamma grew up here, though her family is from Pun-jab; Baba met her while he was here for work.

Memories wash over me of Mamma and Baba, always with a packed itinerary: countless visits to see their old friends, meetups with distant relatives who barely knew my name, poojas in temples and at neighbors’ homes, shopping trips to get all the Desi things we couldn’t get in D.C., and, most important, revisiting the place where my parents fell in love.

But I haven’t been back in years. This time, I get to call the shots. I get to experi-ence my parents’ country, my homeland, on my own terms.

My phone vibrates, signaling a bunch of messages in the group chat with my par-ents:

Mamma: Everything okay? Send a thank-you text to Sharmila Aunty and Rajesh Uncle for taking care of you during your first few days in India.

Make sure you keep a close eye on your purse.

Did you map out the way to campus from the train station? Do you need to take rickshaw?

I roll my eyes but smile at the barrage of texts from my mom. If anyone has any questions about where I get my extreme Virgo-ness, they just have to meet her. I use one hand to toy with my nose ring while I type with the other.

Archi: I have all my things, and campus is super close to the station. And I already texted them. Don’t worry! I’ll be fine!

Mamma: So glad you chose to study in Jaipur.

I tuck my phone away. I’m glad too, but this wasn’t the original plan. My school, Odyssey Global High, requires students to study abroad for a semester, so I always knew I’d travel. But if you’d asked me a year ago where I’d be studying as an ex-change student, I would have said with the confidence of a madly-in-love, delu-sional girl, “London, with my boyfriend.” After all, in the winter semester of ninth grade, when I started dating Nick, we decided we would go to London together during the fall semester of our senior year.

Well, I mean . . . he decided.

And considering how I’m sitting on a train to Jaipur, about to spend my last semes-ter of high school at Vidyadhar Bhattacharya International School, also known as VBIS, it’s pretty obvious that plan didn’t work out. The tale’s as old as time: Girl likes boy. Boy likes girl. The summer before senior year, boy tells girl he has to fo-cus on his college apps and no longer has time to put in the effort a relationship requires. Girl tells boy, “What effort are you talking about? I planned every single one of our dates!” Boy shatters girl’s heart, making her question whether he ever really cared about her. Classic.

After Nick and I broke up, everything changed. No more London. No more boy-friend. I grit my teeth, reminding myself that this semester isn’t about any of that.

This semester is a Nick-free zone.

In fact, it’ll be a boy-free zone.

This semester will be strictly about Archi Dhawan.

The door to the train car opens, and the ticket collector walks in. “Ticket, ma’am?” he asks, giving me a once-over. I present it to him, my first purchase in rupees. “Chai service will begin soon,” he says.

As he moves on to the next passenger, I wonder what he saw when he walked up to me. He spoke in English, not in Hindi. Did he do that because he could tell I’m American? I’m dressed in Indian clothes--a kameez blouse in pale green, matching embroidered pants, my favorite gold nose ring. And, well, I am Indian. Nobody at home would deny it--in fact, in the States, I feel as if some people see that I’m In-dian before they see anything else about me. Here I worry it’s the opposite: that people will be able to tell right away that I’m an outsider. That while my roots are Indian, I’m not from here. That the moment I speak, my Americanness will jump out and be the thing they fixate on.

But I tell myself that, at first glance, people won’t know. I spent enough summers in Jaipur as a kid in the humid monsoon season, running up to the rooftop of my grandparents’ house, feeding the cows on the street vegetable scraps from our cooking. We didn’t visit for many years after my grandparents passed, but when I found myself without a study-abroad destination after the breakup and it was too late to join Whitney in Paris, I dug through the online brochures and found one with Jaipur on the cover page.

Suddenly, everything clicked into place.

Desi families, especially my own, love astrology, and for a moment I thought, This is why the universe meant for Nick and me to break up: so I could go back to the place my family once called home and get a fresh start.

Sometimes, when I make decisions, I picture an angel on one of my shoulders and a devil on the other. They argue, and it helps my brain sort through choices. The night I chose to go to Jaipur, the angel said, In India, you could learn so much about who you are! The devil said, You could get revenge on Nick by having a way better study-abroad experience than he does! At the end of the day, they were both saying yes.

I unzip my backpack and pull out the welcome packet Odyssey gave us during the study-abroad orientation, along with my journal-sketchbook, which is stuffed with papers I haven’t yet glued down. If I’m going to force myself to stay awake, I may as well be productive.

I run my fingers across the cover of the eight-by-twelve book, my most prized pos-session. I’m on my third one now, having filled two others since I started high school. It’s full of diary entries, Polaroids, receipts from cool places I’ve been to, and doodles in the margins. It’s my memory storage, to-do list, and dream journal all in one.

I spread out my things on the table in front of me. Carefully, I paste my boarding pass onto the top of a fresh page. Below it, I write Museum Internship Capstone Project. Rediscovering myself post-breakup is actually the second priority for this trip. The first is my final, semester-long Capstone project.

Whitney did hers in the fall, and being the creative she is, she wrote, directed, and performed a one-woman play. She got an A. The thing is, I’m not a creator. I’m a curator.

Back when I was still planning on going to London, I intended on doing a curatorial internship at a museum there for class credit. I’ve always had an eye for art, what with Baba taking me to all the free D.C. art museums every weekend when I was growing up. We still go to the Renwick Gallery to see new exhibits, and I always find myself marveling not only at the art itself...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Children's Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593571584
• ISBN 13: 9780593571583
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 321
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland