Never judge a book by its cover. For, the cover of Scandalous left little to imagination — it screamed sex, revenge and Hollywood drama. I was pleasantly surprised with what the book did offer in comparison to what I thought it will.
Scandalous has a strong sense of drama throughout and the characters are few, thankfully. The main ones being Sasha Miller, a brilliant physics student of Cambridge University with zero social skills. She leaves in her second year after losing her genius theory and dignity to Prof Theo Dexter — Theo, who she is in love with, or so she thought.
Theo, a womaniser at Cambridge, who with his charming personality and handsome features, gets a chair in the university and all the young female students he fancies. All this, without the knowledge of his unsuspecting and naïve wife, Theresa Dexter. Theresa Dexter is blindly in love with Theo and the works of Shakespeare. Blindly, for she is brilliant at her work but knows not what her neighbour and the whole of Cambridge does about the man she married.
From Cambridge, the story moves to US where Theo, with the help of the stolen theory and natural good looks becomes a TV star, presenting science to the common man. The ever dutiful wife, Theresa goes with him to teach at UCLA and a scorned Sasha Miller follows him to Harvard Business School. For the brilliant scientist that she is, Sasha Miller knows that to become rich enough to revenge the man who wronged her in many ways, business was the answer.
The rest of the story has a host of potentially interesting characters, but remain unexplored. Bagshawe is a good storyteller and kindles the curiosity of the reader, but her attention to detail about each character’s sex-exploits, down to the colour of underwear is unwarranted.
As entertaining as the book was, there were also parts where one wonders where Bagshawe is heading. It is a fictional book about physicists alright, but that doesn’t give one the authority to fictionalise science. Take a line from the book for instance — ‘Sasha had stumbled across a theory so simple and yet so radically new it could change the face of modern astrophysics’. First, no one ‘stumbles’ across a theory. And no theory is ‘simple’ if it changes the view of astrophysics (as Bagshawe tells us).
And a brilliant, up-and-coming scientist sleeps with her ‘not-smart-to-be-a-prof’ guide, but thinks he is brilliant too? And in the very same field that she specialises? And this conclusion, after working with him for more than a year? There are a lot of loopholes in the story.
One thing Bagshawe does get right is the chemistry between Sasha Miller and her boss Jackson Dupree. And I don’t blame Bagshawe for not letting it happen when it was supposed to.
Harvard Business School can do a lot of things to people who go there. But is it possible to transform a girl who answered ‘books’ when Cambridge asked her what she would bring to the school, into a brilliant team leader with excellent communication skills post Harvard? Revenge and HBS can do wonders to a person, but this is pretty much magic.
Scandalous is an easy read and good entertainment. Just like most Hollywood movies, not surprisingly. They both deal with romance, drama and happy endings. It’s good entertainment till it lasts.
—sitadotmani@gmail.com