It's your move, Wordfreak! - Falguni Kothari

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Synopsis:

A blind-date between a couple builds into a passionate romance and meaningful relationship before it gets complicated

Category:
Simple, Witty, Funny

Genre:
Romance

Language:

Though there is no profanity, there are graphic love-making scenes.

Favorite Quote:
None

Review:

WordFreak, aka Aryan is a successful page-3 architect who is completely smitten when he meets his online scrabble partner, WordDiva (Alisha). Being a divorce lawyer, Alisha is naturally hesitant to jump into a relationship, an online one at that. However, there is a whirlwind of romance and they seem like a couple of puzzle pieces falling in place with family and friends filling the landscape up. Mid-way through the book, the expected twist happens, albeit from unexpected quarters.

“It’s your move, Wordfreak!” unintentionally drives home an important point. While a title is not a determinant, it should nevertheless be relevant. The book was marketed with the following tag line – 
What do you get when you mix words and the World Wide Web? –  A Scrabbulous Romance.  
The nerd in me expected a lot of witty one-liners and a war-of-words. However, there is nothing Scrabbulous about it. The book mentions a couple of games between the two (with more focus on their chatting than the game itself), and other than the nicknames, it doesn't play any part in the narration at all. A more appropriate title would have been “Emotional Baggages” or some such.

Dissatisfaction with the title was compounded with an overdose of romantic-novel clichés. The tall, handsome and extremely successful hero, the grounded, practical and sexy heroine, corny lines (After meeting her for the first time, Aryan believes He could move mountains, swim across oceans, leap into the cloudless sky just to see her sweet face and bask in her glory – Seriously?) and the cringe-worthy description of their love making scenes.  The witty dialogues are not so witty, and the funny one-liners seem contrived.

However, where first-time author Falguni Kothari stumbled with the naming and the language, she made up for it through her protagonists and plotting. 

Most of the new authors make a common mistake – they don’t build their characters. Even within a strong plot and superior language, they end up looking like roughly sketched caricatures mouthing the written lines. Kothari's character building is spot-on. All the female characters have been portrayed as strong and independent with a unique personality to match. Though their male counterparts were a tad unrealistic (A man may be able to move mountains, but he cannot change his beliefs in a course of 3 months just because his lover told him to), they are unravelled slowly and systematically. 

Strong characters required a stronger plot, and the author was able to provide it to them. Aryan’s inclination towards environment-friendly construction (loved the tree-house idea!) stuck the green chord in me. However, I wish he had been kept more realistic, and not made out to be a goody-two shoes, by using his money to finance rural projects (Only Margaret Mitchell had the guts to make her primary characters unabashedly selfish and the talent to make them so memorable). The importance given to auxiliary relationships (Uncle-Nephew, Grandmother-Grandson, Mother-Daughter and girlfriends) were heart rendering.

Verdict:

It’s a mixed bag, where the positives manage to outshine the negatives. If you can get past a couple of glitches, the book is an ideal relaxing read for the weekend.