I stumbled across It’s Your Move, Wordfreak! on a list of Indian romances. The book has a lot going for it. It’s a cute premise—Alisha and Aryan meet online playing Scrabble. They really hit it off and decide to go on a semi-blind date. Alisha’s a smart and successful divorce lawyer who’s a little commitment-phobic due to her own parents’ failed marriage. Aryan’s a hot man-about-town who also happens to be a wildly successful architect.

The characters are interesting and likable enough. It’s all a nice setup for the story, but I think the fact that the date is the opening scene is a critical problem. For one, we don’t get to see any of the original courtship, which is a shame. We know from later that their online chats were witty and at times risqué. It would have been fun to see this. Then, the date itself goes very well. She meets his family and they love her. He meets hers and they love him. Etc. There’s basically no conflict at all until about halfway through the book. The seeds of later conflict are set in the first half, sure (Aryan has issues with his father and Alisha has a difficult client). But everything goes swimmingly until a sudden breakup. That’s where things finally really get started.

Once that happened, the book got more compelling because it finally felt like things were happening. (Reading it was kind of an interesting lesson in plotting. Even though lots of ”stuff” happened in the first half, it didn’t feel that way because of the lack of conflict.) The subplots are interesting and get resolved nicely. As I mentioned, the characters are good—they’re compelling and believable and I definitely rooted for them once things started going wrong.

I did have to make some allowances for cultural differences, especially because one of the subplots has to do with domestic violence, and it’s just not handled the same way it would be in the US. Something happens to Alisha at one point and Aryan’s and the others’ reactions were hard for me to stomach. His ultimate response was to sort out the problem with old-fashioned testosterone-fueled violence, with some Indian bribery thrown in for good measure. Still, the novel stayed fairly cute as that was somewhat glossed over.

In summary, this book could easily appeal to fans for English romance set in India (Mumbai to be specific). Just beware a slow start.