Girl Gone Viral by Alisha Rai Series: Modern Love, #2
Published by Avon on 21st April 2020
Pages: 400
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OMG! Wouldn’t it be adorable if he’s her soulmate???
I don’t see any wedding rings [eyes emoji]
Breaking: #CafeBae and #CuteCafeGirl went to the bathroom AT THE SAME TIME!!!One minute, Katrina King’s enjoying an innocent conversation with a hot guy at a coffee shop; the next, a stranger has live-tweeted the entire episode with a romantic meet-cute spin and #CafeBae is the new hashtag-du-jour. The problem? Katrina craves a low-profile life, and going viral threatens the peaceful world she’s painstakingly built. Besides, #CafeBae isn’t the man she’s hungry for...
He’s got a [peach emoji] to die for.
With the internet on the hunt for the identity of #CuteCafeGirl, Jas Singh, bodyguard, friend, and possessor of the most beautiful eyebrows Katrina’s ever seen, comes to the rescue and whisks her away to his family’s home. Alone in a remote setting with the object of her affections?
It’s a recipe for romance. But after a long dating dry spell, Katrina isn’t sure she can trust her instincts when it comes to love—even if Jas’ every look says he wants to be more than just her bodyguard…
When Katrina King’s visit to a cafe results in a narrative spinning out of control thanks to a fame-hungry stranger, her sudden viral fame threatens her ordered, routined life and pushes her friend/bodyguard of many years to hide her away at his family peach farm. It takes, predictably, the intervention of animals and friends and family for the status quo to change between them, but it’s still a slow, slow burn of a romance, with a lot of thoughts about ‘why this shouldn’t happen’ up until the last third of the book.
Both Jasvinder Singh and Katrina are cautious in their own ways thanks to their own personal histories, but the jigsaw puzzle of both Jas’s and Katrina’s lives are revealed in fragments, which proved frustrating at times as I tried to piece together it all without the whole picture coming into play. Yet these seemed fairly inconsequential even as the story wore on, as Rai chooses to take the smoother and calmer path to a HEA that simply creeps up on you.
Alisha Rai’s ‘Girl Gone Viral’ is a different animal from its predecessor and it’s a change that I don’t exactly know how to deal with—not a bad one, since it sort of hovers between contemporary romance and a slight threat to privacy that requires nothing more than staying low and some familial, domestic upheaval. The angst level is low—not the sort that pulls the emotions out of your chest and has it aching—with an equally-strange low level of steam that’s unusual for Rai’s writing. Still, the last few bits of the book were the parts that I truly found enjoyable, much more than the first, slower-paced sections where things just trundled along, despite the softer and sweeter protagonists who actually do deserve each other and their HEA.
