10sapphire

Reviewed at JudgingCovers.co.uk As embarrassing as it is, I’ve always quite liked reality television. If it involves a group of weirdos desperately clinging to their 15 minutes of fame, it’s likely that I’ll be hooked… so when I stumbled upon The Hating Game, a book based around a reality TV show, I couldn’t resist. The story centres around Mattie Johns, a shrewd business woman who is having a bit of a crisis. Her recruitment company is failing and she’s facing bankruptcy – all thanks to her cheating ex, Kyle, who stole most of her clients when he started his own business after their split. When Mattie is approached by an ambitious TV producer with an idea for a reality show – one with a £200,000 prize – it seems to be her last hope to save her business. She thinks it’s just a simple dating show: go on four dates, let viewers vote for their favourite guy, and then spend two weeks on holiday with the winner. If she can last the two weeks, the money’s hers. But there’s a twist. The men are all her ex-boyfriends. I’m sure many of you would rather stick pins in your eyes than spend two weeks with your ex… It is made very clear throughout the book that Mattie has trust issues. Her father left when she was very young, and so her mother has instilled in her the idea that she should never rely on a man. She’s spent years dating men that meant nothing to her – Kyle was the only one that she ever really fell for, and he broke her heart – but Talli Roland has written Mattie’s character in such a way that I found her quite hard to sympathise with. To be blunt, she’s a bit of a cow. She may be ‘independent’, but she treats people badly, and her moaning about how she doesn’t need a man gets very irritating. At various points in the story I wanted to give her a good shake and tell her to get over herself. Thankfully, The Hating Game is written in the third person, so we experience a lot of different viewpoints. I’m not sure I could have handled Mattie’s attitude if I’d had to suffer her first-person narrative. Roland explores the thoughts and actions of all the exes, the production team behind the show, and Mattie’s best (and seemingly only) friend, Jess – all fairly one dimensional characters, but they do work well to create an easy, readable story. Roland goes into a lot of detail about the making of the TV show, and seeing the ‘backstage’ antics is a real selling point for the book. The producers are extremely manipulative, pushing the word ‘reality’ to its limits, which initially makes great reading. But then comes my biggest complaint: it all went a bit too far. The plot reaches a point where it crosses the line from dramatic to unrealistic. While I’m sure there are people in the television industry that push the boundaries when it comes to ethics, The Hating Game became very hard to believe towards the end of the story. On one level this is pretty average chick lit, with one of those storylines where you know exactly who the protagonist should end up with from the start. But the reality TV aspect, even at its more unbelievable moments, does give The Hating Game a bit of an edge. If you wasted years in front of Big Brother, give it a go – even with its flaws, The Hating Game is still more entertaining than watching a house full of ‘eccentrics’ draw up a shopping list.

2022-10-21 05:31