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.
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