TEST
Girl Gone Viral is fluffy and substantive, emotional and trenchant, sad and joyful. It’s a lovely feast of human emotions that will fill the reader’s heart with gladness.
Ex-model Katrina King is a romantic at heart; a romantic who keeps mainly to herself, content to maintain comforting routines in her rich widowhood. She spends most of her time inside away from the public eye, and while she’s invested in dating apps she’s never used one herself.
In fact, if she weren’t the subject of a sudden viral hashtag, she might even find the notion of her non-romance with a total stranger cute.
Unfortunately, she is now #CuteCafeGirl, presumed to have landed herself in a sweet, romantic fling with a guy whom she accidentally spilled her food on in a coffee shop. Sadly for the internet, Katrina has not seen #CafeBae since their encounter – they are definitely not dating. Katrina had been trying to get herself back out on the dating market, but this puts an extreme halt to that hope – worse, the pressure of her sudden viral fame ramps up her anxiety.
Enter handsome and erstwhile Jasvinder – Jas -Singh, who’s been a friend of Katrina’s forever and her bodyguard since her husband passed away and he switched his services to following her. He offers to help her hide out at his family’s peach farm, which will be a secluded and quiet place for her to wait out her fame and heal up emotionally.
As Katrina settles in – and comes to enjoy and clash with Jas’ family – she starts to discover who she really is. But can she ever get Jas to look at her as more than a professional duty? And can she put the toxic relationship she has with her father behind her?
Girl Gone Viral is about family, a love that develops in sweet slow-burn manner, and the difficulties of viral fame.
Katrina is a fine, relatable heroine who is complicated but completely sympathetic. She has some serious personal scars; she’s hiding from her emotionally abusive father, who tended to use her anxiety against her, and during the height of her fame she was kidnapped and held for ransom. That left her with a panic disorder, all of which feels accurately and sensitively portrayed.
Jas, too, has emotional scars as a result of infighting with his family and a severe conflict with his grandfather Andreas, as well as PTSD from his military service. He’s steadfast, true, loyal and tough – a good hero, with strong moral fiber.
The romance is adorable. Jas defends Katrina and her recovery with the fierceness of the most loyal friend and the most dedicated lover; he’s not one to be messed with. But Katrina, too, urges Jas to get things together and work it out with his family.
I liked Katrina’s friendship with Rhiannon, who’s loyal and friendly, and I liked Bikram, Jas’ bitter brother, who is more than a bit put out by the sudden appearance of Katrina in their lives and his grandfather’s preference for Jas.
If the story has any real flaws, it’s that it hits a lot of familiar, tropey, expected points. Jas and Katrina adopt a lost dog; they wrangle with terrible memories and worse past trauma; the country is a healing place that is an almost paradise-like contrast when compared to the city.
But I didn’t mind that; not when the story is told in Rai’s engaging style. Girl Gone Viral is a weighty breeze of a novel, and it has character, form and personality and a very sweet, swoonworthy romance between two strong people. It’s a marvelous read.
Buy it at: Amazon/ Audible or shop at your local independent bookstore
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Grade: A-
Book Type: Contemporary Romance
Sensuality: Warm
Review Date: 20/04/20
Publication Date: 04/2020
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
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I am sad. Alisha Rai was such an auto-buy for me, and I utterly loved each book until this series.
I just read Girl Gone Viral and was so disappointed.
It was a chore to finish.
I really liked all the characters, and their story was fine for me, and a few truly lovely scenes were heartwarming, also including the friends.
The disappointment:
It was painfully repetitive for me, both leads thoughts and scenes, especially in the first part of the book seemed endless with no new content added, the description of their daily ritual routines, the need for structure and order, their internal dialogue about “do I / don’t I” went on and on, repeating without truly new elements, their bad experiences were referred to constantly, using nearly the same words. It was like being present at someone’s sad and boring internal monologues – with their growth / change then getting done in a few pages,
-> If the story had been streamlined by a third, I would have really liked it. And there would have been zero loss if only the repetitions were cut.
-> If the story had gone into addressing the traumas and pains, it would have become a very different story, fairly dark and hard, but potentially just as worth reading.Maybe then the drawn-out painful internal dialogues would be vital to addressing them through growth and change that addressed them. And I would have learned something more about the conditions these characters were struggling with.
Smaller bother:
I found the “casting against expectation” intrusive at some point. The housekeeper is a man, the boss of Jas in the army is a woman, the lady friends are all racially and religiously different, the hero is also of a different race/religion, the hero’s brother is getting married to a man, the powerful rich grandfather has no attitude of superiority and no moment of arrogance towards his staff …. and there is not a single moment of misunderstanding, confusion, and not a single character who has a second of negativity due to their race / religion. Maybe in California this truly can happen that way – to me it felt like a fairytale wishful thinking that glosses over our world and detracted from the book because it was so constant – I like seeing diversity work, and I admire people who make it work – but it is unfortunately not utterly seamless.
-> The bit of description of Yuba City, and its mixed racial history, which was super interesting and nice, but got drowned in the overabundance of diversity above.
Finally:
Even with the warning from reading review and comments here, I found the resolution of the invasive social media plot so fairytale-like, and under-developed, that it hurt, it felt disrespectful to anyone who has truly struggled with this.
Summarizing:
If this had been a category romance, cut by a third, it would have been wonderful.
(I can also more easily suspend belief for the cheesy easy resolutions and for the wishful thinking cast of characters in category books.)
For a single title, I felt very disappointed.
Slogging through all the overlengthy bits detracted from my enjoyment of a few utterly wonderful scenes, such as the interaction of the two brothers, the leads few scenes of making love, the moment when he finally manages to talk with his family, the love declaration moment and the friends/family involvement, the wonderful scene where she deals with her dad… it got drowned in the rest for me.
I am sorry to feel negative, I dare to express my opinion, anyway.
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My favorite story about social media and its pressures is Jenny Holiday’s superb Famous. It makes it so clear that the eye of the public, adoring or not, is such a burden. I will check this one out!
Oh, the Holiday book is SO good!
Nice review, and I do agree this one is fluffy and breezy. That though is the main reason I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped. I requested an arc for review because the idea of a young woman outed on social media seemed really interesting as a premise. I had read too Rai’s own scary personal account of what happened to her when an angry man stalked her virtually. So, I had lots of expectations but ended up being disappointed that the theme of privacy invasion in the social media age had a fairly shallow treatment. The book sets up this theme really early as a social problem in need of examination, and then it doesn’t take it on substantially, and I kind of disliked the resolution of it. I also didn’t ever really buy into why Katrina’s conversation with a cute guy in a café captured so much public attention either. I mean, I know that some viral stories strangely do become sensations just because…but this one seemed especially trivial to me. Maybe they all are and that’s the point, but if so, meh…
Jas is sweet, and I too liked the side characters, especially Jas’s brother.
One of my favorite books this year is Rachel Van Dyken’s FINDING HIM (although, I do think you have to read the first book of the duet, STEALING HER, first to get the full arc of the story—the heroes of the two books are twins), where one of the subplots is what happens when you have an enormous social media following and you do something that “upsets” your previously-adoring fans. FINDING HIM shows how internet-celebrity (or any kind of celebrity) is really a double-edged sword.
That sounds good! The dangers of social media seems ripe for all kinds of stories.
I’m surprised you thought she was going to go darker with this one. Between the cover and the description I wasn’t expecting something uberdark. It’s just substantive enough to make its case, and yes, avoids a deep dive into the nightmare of stalking
I could actually buy that plot point – we’ve had people go viral simply for being handsome Wal-Mart workers. Give people a romance and they go wild.
I guess I was expecting deeper, if not exactly dark from the description. Privacy invasion via social media seems dark enough as an issue, and I was also just let down by the rather quick and pat resolution. Also, just prior to the release of this book, Rai published her personal account of cyber invasion and it was a distressing account and I had it in my head as I picked up this one to read. Not sure why she published both narratives at the same time if she didn’t feel a connection.
As far as book covers, I’m still unsure how to interpret them as a blank and foolproof statement on book content. Some cartoon covers have masked some pretty steamy reads (Tessa Bailey) and even rom-coms that use them have more serious and tearjerking stories and so I haven’t become entirely convinced that a cartoon cover means an entirely light read.
I can believe the trending phenomena though, even if I find it silly. I’m on Twitter enough to see and scratch my head at things that suddenly trend and then evaporate in 24 hours.
Yeah, the weakest part of the plot point is the resolution – I didn’t want to give that one away, but it’s not realistic in any way and actually in a way kind of insults the reader’s intelligence. But I’m happy to separate the two experiences, unless she would prefer to have them consumed in tandem.
I meant the back cover copy in general vs cartoon covers, I should’ve emphasized.
Ahh, the youth of America. I’m always amused when someone goes viral just for being aesthetically pleasing.