“The Three LIves of Cate Kay” by kate fagan

Woohoo! First book of 2025! This was my January BOTM club pick. I was super excited to see the January book picks because I actually skipped my December pick and I had gone way too long without reading. Sure, there are probably a few hundred books lying around my apartment that I could’ve read, but I wanted to read something NEW and exciting. I picked this novel by Kate Fagan first and foremost, because it was described as a book about books — or more specifically, it was a book about an author and her books. What I also liked about this option was that I read in the excerpt that the main character, the author of the fictional book, uses a pseudonym to publish her books. I’ve always thought that if the time and day ever comes that I ever get around to finishing a book and getting to the publishing stages, I would probably want to publish under a pen name as well, so this really caught my eye.

The first thing I want to mention about this book is that there is a LOT of point-of-view changes. Like a TON. I know that this is something I’m a little bit picky about as a reader, but there does get to a point where, even if it is being used as a plot mechanism, you’ve introduced too many characters, which is how I felt here. Some of the characters being introduced didn’t even feel like they contributed to the storyline at all. Unless they were talking about the main character, her best friend, or her girlfriend, I could not keep all the different names straight. In my opinion, I think you can introduce maybe three to four narrators without your readers getting all scatterbrained.

I was entirely uninterested in reading the excerpts from the main characters book, because now, in addition to the fifteen (exaggerating here) characters in the actual novel, Fagan also wrote excerpts of another fictional in this book. I felt like that was asking a lot of the reader to not only read the book in hand, but also the book that the narrator was writing. To be honest, I did not read them. I don’t think my idea or understanding of the book was impacted at all by me reading it or by me not reading it.

Now what I will say about this book is that it had some crazy plot twists. I’m not going to spoil them, but there were at least two moments where I sat there and thought to myself, “I can’t believe she just did that.”

Ultimately, I feel…underwhelmed…by this book. I’m not incredibly disappointed, but I do think that it wasn’t exactly the book I thought I was getting myself into. The pacing fell off a little bit at the end for me, especially compared to the slow build in the beginning. Additionally, I thought that some of the secondary characters could use a smidge more development, I didn’t really feel particularly engaged or invested in any of them. That being said, I’m still going to give it 3.25 stars out of 5 because I think that some people would really, really like this book. It almost reads like it belongs in the same category and playing field as Taylor Jenkins Reid, so if you’re a fan of her work, I would definitely point you in this direction for your next read!