Both my 9-year-old Bengali-American daughter and American me enjoyed this book. Sunita, the protagonist, is NOT "too good to be true." Much of her charm lies in the honesty with which she is depicted. She can be thoughtless and even cruel, and yet she is always an attractive heroine.

Children of two cultures may well identify with the embarrassment Sunita feels when her "different " grandparents come to town and her parents are transformed into traditional Indians. Any young woman is likely to feel that Sunita's problems and her ways of coping with and avoiding them are much like her own. Educational without being "preachy." A fine read!

I happen to like this book alot. The character and I have the same name, Sunita. Even though it was spelled differently. I'm not Bengali but that's where my parents got the name from.

The story is funny and the character is easy to relate to. She's not perfect which is probably what makes her so likeable. She's having some problems being different and all. Her grandparents visiting from India doesn't help much either. She is forced to cease her blossoming relationship with Michael because she's not allowed to bring boys over. Her grandparents might freak!

But in the end, she learns to appreciate who she is and culture. Being uniqye is better than liek eeveryone else. And she and Michael end up friends, or more after all. The story ends with this last statement when Michael sees her in a saree and asks her if she's an India Princess or something: "I'm sure, Michael," she tells him, giving him lone of her trademark smiles jsut to prove it." How sweet!

In the Sunita Experiment, Mitali Perkins captures the "culture clash" issues that young Indian-Americans face in school and at home. Perkins' title character, Sunita, took me back to my junior high days when I was trying to figure out how Indian or how American I wanted to be. Throughout this book, I was able to identify with Sunita's emotions and behavior. Like Sunita, I was sometimes annoyed with Indian traditions and longed to be more "American". At other times, I was proud of my Indian heritage.

I am 23 yrs old now. I grew up in Wisconsin where the Indian-American community is very small. I would have loved to have read this book when I was in grade school. This book would have made me realize that the feelings I had were not unusual. And my family wasn't so weird after all. I recommend this book to all young Indian-Americans. Parents too could use this book as a way to better understand their children's feelings.