Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman

I always pause and investigate when I see book jackets that look remotely Indian-- I blame it on my Bollywood obsession. The thing about YA books from/about India is that you can, in my experience, count on them having the same basic plot:  young teen girl, everything starts out nice but then, uh-oh, you are getting old, you should put away your girlish dreams of education/ independence/whatever, instead we should probably arrange a marriage for you, but hey, maybe by the end something will happen that will make us think that you should get to do what you want.  The only real difference is that with those Shabanu books it took a trilogy and a lot of depressingness to get there, whereas here it all happened in a couple hundred pages.  Of course, it makes sense--the melodramatic Bollywood style of storytelling wouldn't really work in book format, and this remainder is, I am forced to assume, a realistic picture of typical Indian teenage life?  It was a pretty good book, all things considered.  It takes place in the early 1940s, mid- WW2, pre-Indian-independence, so there's a layer of "Jai Hind, down with the British oppressors, way-to-go-Gandhiji" freedom fighting to set against the main character(I already forgot her name, I am awful)'s personal struggle for independence.  As far as these books go, it was a good one.  No Huger Games of course, but then, what really is?  Thank you, Suzanne Collins, for ruining my life.  Everything else will just be okay.