C
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance
Theme: Reality TV, One Night Stand, Second Chance
Archetype: Rockstar/Musician
My only exposure to the Bachelor franchise is Elyse’s commentaries/summaries of episodes. But apparently a book set in a Bachelor-like TV show works for me! With some caveats.…
Georgia is a cast member of Love Shack, along with 19 other women, most of whom are in pursuit of the bachelor: Roland, a professional tennis player, who is currently not playing due to an injury.
You don’t meet all of the women, obviously. It would be unwieldy and confusing if you did. Instead you meet the core group who make it through a few rose ceremonies. We have Monica, another tennis player, Olie who sells upwards graters*, and Brooklyn – the lone disabled person (she uses a wheelchair).
*Olie is a firm believer that grating upwards is the superior technique and she sells graters built for this purpose. I know, right!?
Georgia, however, is ‘not there for the right reasons’ as she is there researching and preparing to write a tell-all expose that will land her a permanent job and save her from the gig economy.
Interestingly the person drip feeding her writing gigs for the magazine at which she is an editor is the same one promising to fight for her to have a permanent job on the magazine staff. I’m going to hide something about this friendship behind a spoiler because it happens near the end but it is something that bugged me.
They go through a friendship break up at the end of the book. Their final conversation is so odd. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s not a fight but it kind of is. There’s a sadness to it but it’s also kind of emotionless and anticlimactic. So odd. Weirdest friend break up ever.
In the conversation I mentioned in the spoiler, it is almost like the one scene tried to do too many things at once and then didn’t accomplish any of them.
Georgia has history with this season’s host, Rhett – a one night stand to be precise. At the time they hooked up, he was famous for being the bachelor on Love Shack during a previous season and he had a budding country music career. So that’s the central couple: Rhett and Georgia. There is never even a vague hint about a love triangle with Roland, the current bachelor.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of drama. A huge amount happens during their time on the show. Georgia grows in confidence and she learns to let her guard down after being burnt. Rhett learns to love again after a dismal relationship as a result of the show.
The rhythm of the story is all over the place, though. Rhett and Georgia are so hot and cold with each other and there are so many misinterpreted cues. Their love story doesn’t follow a recognisable pattern nor does it make a whole lot of sense. I didn’t mind it too much while I was reading but now as I reflect on it, I find myself a bit irritated by the lack of a clear trajectory.
This might well be a problem unique to me. I prefer stories where the couple grow gradually closer until a third act rupture of some kind (provided that it’s not something that could be solved by a 2 minute conversation) until they find their happily ever after. This book does not do that. These two vacillate so widely in how they treat one other that I couldn’t actually tell when we’d finally reached the HEA. If that’s okay with you, you’ll probably enjoy this book more than I did.
There is something else that bugs me about the book but I’m going to hide it behind a spoiler because it’s only revealed a bit later. It’s to do with insta-love.
Allegedly, Rhett and Georgia fall in love during their one night stand a year prior to the show being filmed. I found this difficult to believe. They had a few hours together at most. If I liked Georgia and Rhett more as people, I’d probably go along with this insta-love more agreeably. But they’re meh human beings.
Because they’re so ‘meh,’ and because I didn’t believe that they’d fallen in love after a one night stand after which they didn’t SEE each other again, the tension of their romance was confusing and unsatisfying. Adding in the emotional bouncing all over the place that I mentioned earlier in reference to the romance plot yields a rather disappointing experience for me as the reader.
What this book gets right is sexual chemistry. There isn’t a lot of sex but what there is is pretty hot. Their sexual chemistry outside of the bedroom is so intense and fun to read. But it felt so different in tone and style from the blander ‘not sexy’ scenes that the two parts felt spliced together rather than a cohesive whole. As a result, the switch from one part to the next was a bit jarring, as if I were reading about two very different couples, not one.
Now that I’ve vented my spleen, let me focus for a moment on the parts I liked. Yes, the sexual chemistry. And I really enjoyed the peek behind the reality show curtain that this book offered. It makes me very curious about other books set on reality TV shoots. I enjoyed how different the women were from each other and the relationships they formed.
It also must be emphasised that I’m a chronic DNFer. I DNF books all the time. I have my kindle sorted into collections. My collection of ‘read’ books is about the same size as my collection of ‘boring’ books (i.e. books that I DNFed). My five star reads are in a collection of their own. My point being, it means something that I dedicated precious reading time to finishing this book and for the most part I enjoyed the experience. It was after I thought about it that I noticed the aspects that bothered me.
This is a debut novel and I’m curious to read what this author writes next. I’m going to keep an eye out.
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