Girl Gone Viral by Alisha Rai

Do you remember this when it happened?

A passenger on a plane watched two people in front of her interact and decided this would make a great "meet cute".  (That's a staple in romance novels and movies.). She chronicled her version of the exchange during a plane ride (cross-county, maybe?  I forget.), and the tweet thread garnered serious interest.  The first tweet had over 800,000 likes and 300,000 retweets.

That's a lot. Consider this: when Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted that Hamilton would stream on Disney+ on July 3, that tweet received 92,300 retweets and 238,000 likes. And he has over 3 MILLION followers on Twitter.

So, again, a LOT.

And many people were swept up in the potential romance of it without considering what an invasion of privacy that really was or that not everyone involved wanted that kind of attention for merely being politely friendly in the forced confines of an airplane.  In fact, the female passenger who was being tweeted about eventually shared a statement through an attorney that pointed out all the not-so-cute elements of the situation.

And, that, my friends, is the set up for Alisha Rai's Girl Gone Viral. Katrina King reluctantly shares her table in a crowded coffee shop with a handsome man.  They have a seemingly benign conversation about cute pets and local pizza places.  When the man turns the conversation into a gambit to ask Katrina out, she turns him down.  He's handsome, but he doesn't make her "zing".  THAT guy, the one that makes all her parts zing is sitting in the cafe, too, working as her bodyguard.

What Katrina doesn't realize is that a woman sitting nearby is sharing the whole experience (including pictures) on Twitter with a salacious twist.  And like the real world story from the plane, this Twitter thread goes viral.

The woman who tweeted it all out, her husband, and the handsome guy who was sitting with Katrina all lean into the story; they lap up the attention.  

Katrina does NOT, for multiple solid reasons, and she and her zing generator, Jasvinder, the aforementioned bodyguard, take off to hide away on his family farm. While they're there, it becomes clear that Katrina's longing for Jas isn't unrequited.  

But they both have family, professional, and up, up-close-personal issues to deal with with before they can find their happily-for-now together.  Like always, Alisha Rai provides that for her characters through heat, affection, amazing friends and family support.  I basically read this in one sitting--annoyed when I needed to pause to do basic things like eat and answer nature's call.  I want to be part of Katrina's friend group and have her cook for me!

Alisha Rai is a one-click auto-buy for me, and if you like contemporary romance, she'll be one for you, too.