Strange Bedfellows by Amanda Mortlock: A witch, a familiar, and a relationship that gets increasingly uncomfortable

There is something undeniably fun about a novel in which a college student is secretly a cat, falls in love with a witch, and discovers that the two of them are connected by a dark magical history. Strange Bedfellows, Amanda Mortlock’s debut novel, has an inherently strange and entertaining premise, and for much of the book, I was perfectly happy to go along for the ride. This is not a novel that is trying to be deeply literary, and it doesn’t need to be. At its best, it is dark, steamy, weird, and playful in exactly the ways its premise promises to be.

Unfortunately, the further I got into the novel, the more its problems began to outweigh its charms. Strange Bedfellows follows Cleo, a college student who has an impossible secret: sometimes she becomes a cat. When she meets Wes, a brooding musician, at a Halloween party, the attraction between them is immediate. Things become considerably more complicated when Wes discovers that the cat who has been part of his life is actually Cleo. Even more complicated is the revelation that Wes is a witch and Cleo is his familiar.

Their relationship brings Bailey and Ollie into the picture, along with a larger magical history that connects all four characters. There are secrets involving Cleo’s past, threats that have been lurking beneath the surface, and a mystery surrounding the strange circumstances of Cleo’s childhood. The novel hints from fairly early on that something much darker is coming, and that larger storyline is where I found myself most interested. In fact, that was part of my frustration with the book. I kept waiting for it to get to the story I actually wanted to read.

The concept behind Strange Bedfellows is a good one. There is an appealing absurdity to the idea of a woman who can transform into a cat, particularly when her human and feline selves seem to have somewhat different relationships to the world around them. The book also has a playful supernatural quality that kept me reading even when other aspects of the story were beginning to wear thin.

In some ways, the cat element reminded me of One Bad Cat and Lance Savage’s serial Phantom Cat. There is something inherently entertaining about stories that take the perspective and capabilities of a cat and make them part of a larger supernatural narrative. Cat is particularly effective because she is able to recognize threats in ways that Cleo cannot. When Cat is prowling around the property and identifying potential dangers, the story suddenly becomes much more interesting. And sometimes, Cat does more than identify those threats. She kills them.

Those scenes were some of my favorites in the novel. Cat seems to have a much deeper understanding of what is happening around her than Cleo does, and the contrast between the two sides of the character is intriguing. In fact, I found myself preferring Cleo when she was Cat. That raises some interesting possibilities that the novel does not explore as fully as I would have liked.

Cleo and Cat seem to regard themselves as separate entities, even though they are obviously two forms of the same person. Cleo generally has surprisingly little interest in what Cat does when she is in control, which becomes particularly strange as the implications of Cat’s behavior become more significant. There are hints that this division could be connected to trauma. Cleo does not remember her life before awakening into existence at the age of five, and the separation between Cleo and Cat could potentially function as a psychological defense against memories of whatever happened to her and her family before that point. That is a fascinating possibility, and I wish the novel had leaned into it more.

Unfortunately, the romance at the center of Strange Bedfellows became increasingly difficult for me to accept. Both Cleo and Wes come across as immature, which may explain why a number of Goodreads reviewers have commented that the book feels more like young adult fiction than adult fiction despite its explicit erotic scenes. The issue isn’t simply that the characters are young or inexperienced. Their emotional behavior often feels underdeveloped in ways that make the relationship difficult to take seriously.

Wes, in particular, repeatedly crosses boundaries that made me uncomfortable. His behavior toward Cleo can be controlling and gaslighting, and there are moments when he uses Bailey to triangulate the relationship and keep Cleo emotionally off balance. What might be intended as possessiveness, intensity, or evidence of how deeply the characters are connected instead starts to look like manipulation.

Cleo isn’t exactly a healthy counterbalance to this. She is extremely clingy and needy, and her emotional dependence on Wes becomes increasingly pronounced. In a real-world relationship, the dynamic between these two would have the potential to become profoundly co-dependent and abusive.

The problem isn’t that a novel depicts an unhealthy relationship. Fiction can—and often should—explore unhealthy relationships. The problem is that Strange Bedfellows frequently seems to romanticize this dynamic rather than interrogate it. The behavior that should make us question the relationship is often presented as evidence of its intensity or depth.

At times, it reminded me of the kind of Wattpad fan fiction that can be fascinating precisely because you can see a young writer working through ideas about romance, obsession, and sexuality without yet having a clear understanding of where the boundaries are or why those boundaries matter. There is a rawness to that approach that can be entertaining, but it also creates problems when the narrative itself doesn’t seem to recognize the distinction between passionate devotion and unhealthy control.

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One of the most troubling aspects of Cleo’s characterization comes after she learns what Wes is. She begins to seem as though she believes her purpose is simply to want what her witch wants. Given the familiar/witch dynamic, there is obviously room for questions about magical bonds, loyalty, and power. But the novel doesn’t do enough to distinguish magical devotion from the erosion of individual agency.

For me, the strongest character in Strange Bedfellows is the one who isn’t technically the character we spend most of our time following. Cat has an instinctive understanding of danger that Cleo lacks. She is decisive, observant, and willing to act when threats appear. When Cat takes over, the story becomes sharper and more focused because she seems to understand the world on a level that Cleo simply doesn’t.

There is also something intriguing about the fact that Cleo appears to have compartmentalized Cat so thoroughly. If that separation is intentional—a trauma response that allows Cleo to exist without consciously confronting what happened to her family—it could have provided the novel with a much richer psychological dimension. Instead, it mostly sits in the background.

I kept wanting the book to push harder into the question of who Cat really is and what she remembers that Cleo doesn’t. The possibility that the cat form represents a part of Cleo’s consciousness that has been protecting her from her own past is far more compelling to me than much of the interpersonal drama between Cleo, Wes, Bailey, and Ollie. And, frankly, Cat is just more fun.

The biggest structural problem with Strange Bedfellows is pacing. The novel takes a very long time to get to the larger story that it keeps hinting is coming. The early sections spend an enormous amount of time establishing Cleo and Wes’s relationship, introducing Bailey and Ollie, developing the relationships among the four characters, and showing them doing increasingly elaborate magical tricks.

There are a lot of magical tricks. So. Many. Magical. Tricks.

Some of this world-building is necessary. The reader needs to understand how these characters interact and what their magical abilities are. But the book spends so much time establishing the foursome’s relationships that the material begins to feel repetitive, particularly when there are already hints that something much more dangerous is waiting just beyond the edges of the story.

The backbiting, jealousy, childish arguments, and interpersonal maneuvering become tiresome long before the larger conflict finally takes center stage. I understood what the author was trying to establish: these four characters have complicated relationships, and their emotional entanglements are important to the larger story. But I didn’t need quite so much evidence of that.

The irony is that the novel’s most interesting material is sitting there in plain sight. There is a larger mystery surrounding Cleo’s past. There are threats returning from that past. There is a violent shared history that the characters don’t fully understand. Cat seems to know more than Cleo does. Something dangerous is coming. That is the story I wanted. I wish Strange Bedfellows had trusted that story enough to get to it sooner.

There is plenty here for readers who enjoy dark paranormal romance, explicit scenes, complicated magical relationships, and stories that aren’t afraid to get a little weird. The central concept is distinctive, and the cat element gives the novel a personality that separates it from a more conventional witchy romance.

But the same things that make Strange Bedfellows unusual also expose some of its weaknesses. The characters often behave immaturely, the romance repeatedly crosses into territory that feels controlling rather than romantic, and the book spends too much time on interpersonal drama and magical antics before finally getting to the larger conflict that makes the premise so intriguing. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that the novel was more interested in telling me that Cleo and Wes were intensely connected than in showing me why their relationship was actually good for either of them.

For me, the best version of Strange Bedfellows would have been darker, stranger, and more focused on its underlying mystery. I wanted more Cat. I wanted more of Cleo’s forgotten past. I wanted more of the threats circling the property and the secrets connecting these characters. And I wanted the novel to take a more critical look at the power dynamics in its central relationship rather than presenting control and dependency as romantic intensity.

Strange Bedfellows has an entertaining idea at its heart, and there are moments when that idea really works. But the novel spends too much time circling its most interesting material instead of trusting it to carry the story. The result is a book that starts as a fun, bizarre supernatural romance but becomes increasingly frustrating as the problems with its characters and pacing become harder to overlook.

Strange Bedfellows by Amanda Mortlock releases September 22, 2026. An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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