THE BAD BOYFRIEND CURSE

Straight‑A student Meera Noorani has her future all planned out, but her first‑ever date ends in her arrest.

This calamity confirms “the curse placed on [her] family four generations ago by a witch doctor in India”: any girl who becomes romantically entangled before age 17 will endure lifelong troubles. Meera waited until her 17th birthday to go out with suitably high-achieving Gabe Bautista, only to seemingly fall victim to a technicality—she was born six weeks premature. Meera leaves Toronto and her grandmother Nani for a summer in small-town Cherrybridge, Ontario, where her mother has moved in with Meera’s new “random rich white guy” stepfather, Jason. Sentenced to community service, she works on park restoration and meets white and Filipino Noah Jacobs, a rumored troublemaker whose kindness and talent challenge her assumptions. Her plan to fake‑date him to undermine Jason’s mayoral campaign exposes an old feud. As Meera grows closer to Noah, she sees how identity, expectations, and desire can upend even the most carefully laid plans. Meera’s relationships with Mom and Nani, marked by distance, conflict, and gradual reconciliation, form an emotionally grounded intergenerational arc. Cherrybridge’s divisions are equally authentic: Meera’s encounters with microaggressions, overt prejudice, and white‑saviorism ring true. The curse functions more as symbolic pressure than a fully realized plot engine, but Meera’s growing bond with Noah captures the charged uncertainty of first love.

A nuanced, socially aware novel that finds its power in the depth of its relationships and representation.