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Monday, February 10, 2014

Reader's Diary #1093- Anuja Chauhan: The Zoya Factor prequel

Always on the lookout for free online short stories, I decided to search Twitter to see what I could find and within 3 minutes came across a short story by Anuja Chauhan: an Indian author, a Valentine's Day story, it was exactly what I wanted. It is untitled and a prequel to her novel The Zoya Factor (which I hadn't even heard of, much less read) but who cares?

The world of this story is completely unfamiliar to me. The narrator, Zoya, is young, talks about Benneton sweaters and fantasizes about Enrique Iglesias. I'm sure there are people like this in Canada, but I certainly don't surround myself with them. Zoya comes across as shallow and annoying. I don't have to like a central character, but it would have helped.

Fortunately, the other Indian references were of a different kind of unfamiliarity, and so the story did, at least, have the armchair traveler appeal.

Without all of that, the plot is okay. Zoya is trying to keep her dignity in tact by not returning to a man she previously thought she loved and who she'd thought, until recently, had loved her back. This part of the story is common, no matter what walk of life.

(Did you write a post for Short Story Monday? If so, please leave a link in the comments below.)
Lunch at Lily’s - masala dosa by BinaryApe, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  BinaryApe 

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