By Aisling Rawle
ARC (Random House Publishing Group – Random House | Random House via Net Galley)
Book Review
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️⭐️
Love island meets Hunger Games meets Too Hot To Handle meets parody meets thriller. Did you catch that? This book is seriously an awesome adventure.
This is such a refreshing, funny, yet scary read.
This is a debut novel from Aisling Rawle. For a rebut, this is incredibly impressive!!!
This delivered so well. Also, can we talk about how gorgeous and unique the cover is? Not only does it capture the book well, but it totally caught me eye. It is very refreshing to see art like this. Love it!! I initially gave it a 4 star review, but this is a 5 star book.
What I Loved:
-The writing style – it was easy for me to follow and this made it enjoyable.
-The call outs of issues within society.
-It gets very annoying when all the humor is about the woman bringing herself down, or about blatant issues happening that just aren’t addressed. I immediately gained more respect for this book for it calling those elements out properly without it seeming like the author was infusing politics of any sort. This was so well done.
-The roasting of the boys being incompetent. It was hilarious at times and truly allowed the book to be entertaining. It also felt very in line with how reality shows typically go.
-The protagonist being a strong character, both well-rounded and mentally strong really helped me root for her. I also loved that she wasn’t made a ditzy blond.
-The call out of the toxic unreality that reality TV show is chef kiss.
-Some of the tasks are outright ridiculous and hilarious.
-The creativity of what happened in prior games is wonderful.
-The cover!!!!
-This book was properly formatted so I could fully enjoy it.
-The last portion of it (ending) was incredible!
What I Didn’t Love:
-This book felt longer than it needed to be, there was a lot of additional detail on the same parts of the show that started to feel redundant. This combined with longer chapters and sex thrown in here and there made it feel less tense and had it feel slightly all over the place. This might have been intentional, as I feel like this is the same feeling I get when watching reality TV too.
-There are three parts to this thriller. I would have preferred three smaller reads I think? The parts didn’t make a ton of sense to me as there as no label for “before” or anything so I was unsure of their exact purpose. The first half of the book totally caught me but I began to lose interest towards the end, which I think is due to length.
-The game itself didn’t make sense as far as the logistics. If I didn’t know how much planning goes into the renting of a mansion and the collecting of sponsorship prize money, I would likely not be annoyed by these details. It did seem to make it a partial parody though and make it a bit ridiculous, which added to my enjoyment. Initially it was annoying, but I appreciate the creativity.
-I would have preferred shorter paragraphs when possible for pace setting. Some of the chapters were really long with very long paragraphs, which I usually anticipate for fantasy books or when a lot of description is needed to describe a setting etc.
I will say, I can’t stop thinking about this book.
I received a free copy and am leaving this review voluntarily.
Thank you for allowing me to read this work of art! This is such a good book!
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