Story for the Week
I was single when I bought my first laptop in 2001—a Compaq—which my computer geek husband told me years later was a ridiculous purchase because “who buys a Compaq?” I was not very computer savvy back then, but it was my first “big” purchase for myself with a bonus I earned at work. I had AT&T DSL for internet service back then, and one evening, I decided to check out AT&T’s chat rooms just for the heck of it.
I’ve always been a night owl, so I ended up befriending a lot of people in the UK who were online during their morning and my evening. One evening while I was chatting, I kept getting a private message from Got Even More Milk telling me “go to bed,” and then Milk would close the message so I couldn’t respond. I was quick enough once to ask why I was being told to go to bed, and Milk said because it was the middle of the night. I responded that it was 8:00 in the evening.
That’s when we discovered that Milk was on the East Coast and I was in the Midwest. Since one of our mutual UK friends had suggested he talk to me, he assumed that I was in the UK as well. (In all honesty, I assumed he was in the UK, but I also admitted years later that I thought he was a big-breasted woman when, in fact, he just liked the “Got Milk?” slogan, and it was already taken when he created a user name.)
From January to June, we continued chatting, first in the chat room, then on Yahoo Messenger, and then finally by phone. When all you can do is talk, you get to know one another really well pretty quickly. After a few flights back and forth to meet in person, he suggested that we had to pick a city. He wasn’t planning to move to the Midwest to live six blocks away and date me, so he said that if I was good enough to live with, I was good enough to marry. We got married that 4th of July weekend in New York, just us, a minister, and our two witnesses. We spent our honeymoon the next day in Jamaica….Hospital Medical Center, where I had my gallbladder removed.
👩⚕️🏥
To this day almost 18 years later, he loves to tell people that we got married on the fourth date, and we love to tell our meet-cute turned love story. 💏 If we were a romance novel, we’d have split up at some point because that’s the formula: boy meets girl, boy and girl have a disagreement, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back for their happily ever after. If I were reviewing my own love story, I would give it ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ stars. For this book about a supposed meet-cute gone viral, not quite so many.
Book Review
⭐⭐
2 Stars for Girl Gone Viral by Alisha Rai
397 pages
Publisher: Avon
Publication Date: April 21, 2020
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Avon.
Publisher’s Description
OMG! Wouldn’t it be adorable if he’s her soulmate??? I don’t see any wedding rings.
Breaking: #CafeBae and #CuteCafeGirl went to the bathroom AT THE SAME TIME!!!
One minute, Katrina King’s enjoying an innocent conversation with a random guy at a coffee shop; the next, a stranger has live-tweeted the entire encounter with a romantic meet-cute spin and #CafeBae has the world swooning. Going viral isn’t easy for anyone, but Katrina has painstakingly built a private world for herself, far from her traumatic past. Besides, everyone has it all wrong…that #CafeBae bro? He isn’t the man she’s hungry for.
He’s got a 🍑 to die for.
With the internet on the hunt for the identity of #CuteCafeGirl, Jas Singh, bodyguard and possessor of the most beautiful eyebrows Katrina’s ever seen, offers his family’s farm as a refuge. Alone with her unrequited crush feels like a recipe for hopeless longing, but Katrina craves the escape. She’s resigned to being just friends with Jas—until they share a single electrifying kiss. Now she can’t help but wonder if her crush may not be so unrequited after all….
************
Main Characters:
- Katrina King – a former model, heiress, and dating app owner turned angel investor who is in love with the idea of being in love and has a secret crush on her bodyguard.
- Jasvinder Singh – Katrina’s bodyguard and friend, former military and stayed on with Katrina when her husband passed away leaving her a large fortune.
- Rhiannon Hunter – Katrina’s friend and business partner on the dating app who lives with Katrina.
- Jia Ahmed – fashion and beauty influencer, sister of one of Rhiannon’s childhood friends, moved in with Katrina and Rhiannon several months ago.
I am clearly in the minority opinion as it relates to Alisha Rai’s Girl Gone Viral because it has received lots of reviews far better than mine. Katrina is a model turned angel investor who is prone to panic attacks and craves her privacy. Jas is her swoon-worthy bodyguard. This story seems to be modeled after the real-life story of the strangers on a plane who were videotaped by someone behind them who posted the potential budding love story. The guy in the video was totally into it. The girl felt like her privacy was invaded. The only difference between that and this is that Katrina innocently shares a table with a stranger in a crowded cafe.
When the story goes viral, Katrina needs an escape. Coinciding with that is Jas’s desire to escape his own reality of a case from his time in the military. Jas just happens to own a house on his family farm several hours away to which they escape and, as expected since this is a romance, their love blooms.
I have read plenty of love stories that I give 3 or more stars. They all have a similar formula, so I’m really rating the execution of the love story, and I found that lacking here. I do applaud the author’s diverse cast of characters, but I felt that there was more wrong with this story than right.
I thought the interactions between Katrina and Jas were really awkward, and a lot of the dialog just felt unrealistic. That and the backstories, outlined in the spoilers below, are what knocked down the rating for me. There’s backstory, and then there’s oh-my-goodness-what-else-could-have-gone-wrong-in-their-lives backstory.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
Katrina’s divorced mother dies, Katrina is then raised by an abusive and controlling father who acts as her manager for a modeling career, she is rescued by a wealthy jeweler who marries her to save her from her father, she’s kidnapped, her husband dies, and she suffers from panic attacks. But hey, she’s worth millions.
Jas is the heir to a peach farm but chooses instead to go into the military, he testified against a fellow soldier who is court martialed and jailed, he goes to work for Katrina’s husband as security, he’s secretly in love with Katrina, he suffers from PTSD, and the guy he testified against is about to be pardoned.
If you’re already a fan of this author, you might enjoy this more than I did, and clearly others did, but it is a “do not recommend” for me.
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