Early Review – Strange Bedfellows by Amanda Mortlock (3/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy / Paranormal
Length: 448 pages
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Release Date: September 22, 2026
ASIN: B0GPJG4FQW
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: eGalley for review from NetGalley
Rating: 3/5 stars

“Cleo is a willfully aloof college student with an impossible secret. When she meets Wes, a brooding musician, at a Halloween party, their connection is instant, electric, and impossible to ignore. Their romance takes a mystical turn when Wes discovers what Cleo’s been hiding: sometimes she takes the form of his pet cat.

Enter Bailey and Ollie—their magical counterparts—who reveal a deeper tie between Cleo and Wes: he’s a witch, and she’s his familiar. As past secrets collide with their entangled present, Cleo faces her greatest fear—losing Wes. With long-gone threats returning and danger looming, Cleo must confront her role in their dark and violent shared history and decide if she’s willing to fight for their future.”

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got this on ebook to review through NetGalley.

Thoughts: This was okay but a bit of a mess. I finished it because it is one of those books where it’s kind of a disaster you struggle to look away from. The pacing was off, the characters were awful to each other, and the storyline kept getting lost in the drama.

Cleo is a college student with a huge secret; she occasionally turns into Cat. With the death of her aunt, she’s decided to rent out the main house to other college students for income and make a studio apartment of sorts out of the shed. Cat has been drawn to Wes and when Cat accidentally shifts into Cleo in front of him, Cleo’s secret is out. When two strangers, Bailey and Ollie, show up at the house the world Wes and Cleo knows is turned on its head. Bailey and Ollie are a witch and a familiar. They believe that Cleo is Wes’s familiar. The four of them form a Coven and start performing magic. However Bailey and Wes both want to know what happened to their parents so they keep pushing to scry the past, which is something better left in the shadows.

This was an oddly paced book. It had side characters that went in and out of the story a bit willy nilly. I struggled throughout to find the thread of the story: is this about Wes and Cleo? Is this about witches? What about the Nots that Cat hunts? In they end, they all tie together…kind of. It is a mess to get through and the reason behind of the Nots and the actions from the past feel forced and contrived because they are brought into the story so abruptly.

So why did I finish it? Honestly, it’s a bit like a train wreck you can’t look away from. I think my main driver in finishing this was to find out if Cleo ever finds any happiness or peace. Yes, a familiar in Cleo’s past did a bad thing, but the past isn’t Cleo’s present. Yes, Cleo was prickly, but she had a lot of reason to be. I found the way people turned on her repeatedly to be disappointing. I also found the way that she is forced to sacrifice her happiness again and again to be depressing. The ending left me disappointed and angry.

This is okay. I did find the look at a witch and this sort of shape-shifting familiar interesting. If your whole purpose in life is to support another person’s, what does that do to you? There are interesting parallels between the scenarios here and the whole blooming trad wife culture. Beyond that, this was a hot mess and needed to be better edited. I was oscillating between 2 stars and 3 stars, but I did finish it and it was a quick read, so 3 stars it is.

My Summary (3/5): Overall this was a mess; the storyline is all over the place, the characters are cruel, and the pacing is off. It was engaging enough for me to finish, but I found the ending sad and disappointing. I don’t plan to pick up any books by Mortlock in the future.