Sang changes her mind every minute. She has a crazy summer for just being sixteen and can't go out on a date. Family crisis played a important part in this book and so did love. It will keep you reding until the end. ( )

I don't normally read YA but completely enjoyed this book - a good read full of teen angst, drama, complex family dynamics, love, and loss. I was thrown back to my teen years and deeply felt Sang's pain, joy, hopeful wishes and embarrassments as my own!

We catch up with teenage girl Sang heading into a swirling upside down summer of the unknown. Sang's summer holds a confusing weave of crushes, new friends, arch enemies, family problems, and humiliations. Sang's pivotal summer just may be the place where she finds her sea legs and swims, instead of sinking. A place where she may finally find herself. And YA Author Lamba gives us a delightful, bittersweet tale to follow - with a heroine we ache and cheer for.

Lamba certainly piles on the heavy, complex family dynamics in Sang's life, making it even more difficult for her to wade through on top of her regular teen issues. Lamba also knows how to vividly draw her readers into a painful teen world where the smallest mortifications can snowball into larger problems. And a world where embarrassment lurks in every encounter, waiting to happen.

Lamba gives us the black and white world of a teen. We witness how a teen's peers can have the power to shoot down a young girl with a few words. It's all or nothing. A world where every day is a roller coaster ride of highs and lows. Yet, Lamba leads Sang down the path to finding her own balance in this rigid world. A world where sparks between a boy can signal true love or not and we, the reader, seethe with death wishes for Sang's arch enemy!

You champion for Sang, as she often searches for the very thing that is in front of her all the time. As Sang learns the true meaning of family and friendship, she also discovers that while you don't always get what you want you may get what you need from the very forces you think are transpiring against you - the ones who love you.

Get ready to be teary-eyed at the end of this sweet coming-of-age book by a wonderful YA author. If I had a teen daughter I would want her to read this. ( )

A very enjoyable read! Althought it is best suited for teenage girls, it can still appeal to adults. I, for one, read this book in one sitting! I will definitely be looking forward to more from this author! ( )

Sang Jumnal’s pre-senior year summer hits the rocks when her parents force her to take swim lessons and she learns that a beloved uncle has a serious—and expensive—disease. But Sang is tired of being treated like a kid, and so she jumps at the chance of romance with the summer lifeguard, heedless of how her behavior affects her friends and family.

I didn’t realize until after I had finished OVER MY HEAD that it is actually somewhat of a sequel to Marie Lamba’s debut novel What I Meant. Which means that OVER MY HEAD can be enjoyed on its own. It is a quick, sometimes annoying, but still gratifying look into a mixed Indian-Caucasian teen’s ups and downs.

The YA world very clearly needs more books like OVER MY HEAD, where the main character is of mixed race, culture is an important part of the story, but the story itself is not about accepting one’s culture or battling people’s ignorance of your culturally different family. Everyone knows a girl like Sang, a girl who is smart but is struggling with familial tensions, who is dealing with changing friendships and fending off the comments of less sensitive classmates. So, take an extremely relatable teenaged female protagonist, add in a dash of Indian culture, and you’ve got a setup that’s easy to connect to yet just different enough to expand readers’ horizons.

Younger teens may be better able to appreciate OVER MY HEAD, as I found Sang and a lot of her behavior a tad immature for my taste. Okay, yes, I understand that feeling restricted by your parents’ seeming lack of trust in your maturity level may drive you to do irresponsible things such as ditching your siblings or sneaking off in the middle of the night with a boy who may or may not be taking advantage of you, but I suppose this was something that I never did in high school (okay, maybe I treated my siblings poorly every once in a while. It’s what big sisters do sometimes, eh?), and so I felt that sometimes Sang’s actions felt a little contrived, a little overdramatic. Some other characters and their situations felt similarly unnatural, mean girls who acted like convenient nemeses to raise our esteem of our beloved protagonist.

Sang’s peers may for the most part feel forced in my opinion, but OVER MY HEAD depicts the nuances of Sang’s family extremely well. I really enjoyed Raina, Sang’s cousin who comes to stay with her. Raina could’ve been yet another shallow mean teenager, or a self-pitying mess, but she is at times shy yet determined, vulnerable yet resilient. Sang’s parents behave believably strictly as well as lovingly, and so on. I often feel like familial relationships are the trickiest things to depict realistically in YA, and so Marie Lamba gets numerous kudos for portraying the Jumnal family in such an empathic and rich way.

Overall, OVER MY HEAD may feel a bit young for high school readers, but younger readers will most likely find a bit of themselves, their frustrations and their desires, in Sang, and cheer this promising young lady on. ( )

A coming of age story full of the regular teenage drama - boys, fights with friends, rebelling against parental authority - that also presents the difficulties of coming to terms with the serious illness of a loved one. Our protagonist is very typical of most sixteen year old girls. She is wrapped up in her quest for summer romance, wanting to be with the guy who isn't right for her and overlooking the one who's perfect. As the story progresses, however, her perspective of love shifts from the desire for the fairy tale romance and to the realization of how much the love of her family means to her. This is a story that I think many young girls will be able to relate to and will thoroughly enjoy. Despite this being a young adult novel and me being an older reader, I still found this an enjoyable book to read. ( )