PATRICIA WANTS TO CUDDLE
SAMANTHA ALLEN
***
Renee has made it: she's in the final four.
But is she dying to win?
Renee should be thrilled to have been chosen as one of the final four contestants in The Catch, the world's biggest reality show. But now she, the other contestants, and Jeremy 'the Catch' have arrived on the remote, wooded island for the final show, Renee begins to wonder if there's something wrong. Is she taking a bigger risk than she realised?
And as she and the other contestants begin their final challenges, they slowly start to realise that the island they've been taken to is hiding a terrifying secret - one that could make the final Elimination Event all too real.
MY REVIEW
***
I recently discovered and fell in love with the TV show Unreal which documents the backstage drama and staged reality of a season on ‘The Bachelor’ and was getting very similar vibes from the blurb of Patricia Wants to Cuddle, just with a slight… twist!
The first half of this book I really enjoyed as we are introduced to the finalists of The Catch - there’s bible loving Lilah-Mae, image obsessed Amanda, vicious Vanessa & disinterested Renee who are all hoping to gain a fiancé and serious ‘Glamstapix’ clout. The chapters jump perspectives between the contestants interspersed with snippets from a gossip blog about the filming and Casey, one of the producers. I thought this was well-plotted and paced and as a reader I got into the idea of the competition and liked hearing about their game plans and motives. Although we are dropped right in at the end of the season there’s enough exposition to feel like we haven’t missed too much.
Then there’s the other element of this book which is basically a sasquatch/bigfoot gore story. This is where I really felt the book started to slip. The book itself is only 250 pages which isn’t enough time to establish both plots properly and the monster is only really introduced at about 70% of the way through. There’s a few love letters between lovers on the island but these did very little to further the plot and could have been skipped. As it stands, we are left with a confusing bigfoot plot wedged into the narrative and we didn’t learn anywhere near enough about the backstories of the people on the island or Patricia. The contestants and production crew are dispatched with relative ease which just made the fact we had spent over half the book on them feel like a waste.
Overall, Patricia Wants to Cuddle is a book of two halves; the ‘Catch’ part of the book is fun but the segue into a monster horror is not done well enough and really needed some more pages dedicated to setting it up or explaining it to make it work. Thank you to NetGalley & Faber & Faber for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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