Take Grady Hendrix’s book My Best Friend’s Exorcism and replace the demon stuff with celebrity stalking, parent-child trench warfare, and YA boy-craziness. Transfer the action to India and make all the characters Hindu. What’s the result? OPERATION MOM (My Plan to Get my Mother a Life and a Man), the newest novel by journalist and podcaster Reenita M. Hora.

Hora’s protagonist is Ila, a Mumbai-based teenager whose idea of a fun summer is to follow Pakistani pop star Ali Zafar on his concert tour. Basically, she wants to be a groupie, though that isn’t how Ila sees it: she once saw Zafar in public, and he smiled at her: clearly, they were meant to be together. There are complications with this plan, not the least of which is Ila’s conservative mother, Veena. Naturally, she doesn’t want her daughter traipsing across India after some singer (she still remembers her own youthful crush on George Michael that ended embarrassingly). Veena would much prefer her daughter to settle down with someone like Dev, a nice young man whom Ila does like but is bent on rejecting. Oppressive-parent characters are usually written as fogies, but Veena has comedic chops. Dismissing her daughter’s Zafar obsession, she says, “At seventeen, you can’t tell love from the backside of a bus.” Determined to follow through with her plan, Ila realizes she needs her mother out of the way. With her best friend Deepali, she launches Operation Mom: attracting would-be suitors for Veena using a dating app profile. The girls, with an assist from Dev, get a little too immersed in their plan, leading to a climax straight out of that old tv sitcom, Three’s Company.

OPERATION MOM is a teen rom-com that’s more “com” than “rom”. Ila and Dev do have a couple of dates, but these aren’t the heart of the book, which seems to be Ila’s other relationships. Her mom is a key one, of course. Then there’s Deepali, the book’s coolest character. “She knew stuff,” Ila muses, “so much stuff, both meaningful and inconsequential. And she thought about it . . . deeply, a quality that I had huge admiration for.” Later, she makes her adoration even plainer: “I wanted to be Deepali when I grew up.” Deepali is shallow, a schemer, and seemingly more trouble than she’s worth. Yet when the worst happens, she doesn’t abandon her friend, giving this tale of teen hijinks its emotional anchor.

Hilarious and heartwarming, Reenita M. Hora’s OPERATION MOM (My Plan to Get my Mother a Life and a Man) bypasses typical YA romance to focus on the deeper relationships of parent-child, sister-sister, and, strongest of all, best friends.

~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader