Following this week’s disastrous finale of The Bachelorette, I’ve had it up to here. At some point, this show used to kind of (sort of maybe) be about falling in love. But that premise seems all but abandoned in favor of being able to boast the most dramatic season ever. The problem with promising that every season? At some point, it stops being about human emotions, and it starts feeling exploitative. It’s seriously getting to the point where I’m considering abandoning the franchise all together.
Fiction about reality TV shows allows us to experience the drama of other people’s lives without real people’s emotions actually being involved. And books like this one end up being kind of wish fulfillment, too. Because when a season ends as disastrously as Jenn Tran’s season just ended, don’t we all just wish Jenn had ditched all these garbage men and ran off with one of the female contestants from the previous season?
Here for the Wrong Reasons by Annabell Paulsen and Lydia Wang
She was a horse girl. She was a wannabe Instagram influencer. Can I make it any more obvious?
No, but really. Krystin is an idealistic young woman from Montana who has rodeo competition on lock. Her dating life, though? Non-existent. In fact, Krystin has never had a boyfriend, but she’s sure of what she wants. She’s hoping she can find it as a contestant on the reality TV show Hopelessly Devoted. (This show is basically just The Bachelor, but instead of giving out roses, they cut strings. It’s the same concept, though)
Meanwhile, Lauren is coming onto Hopelessly Devoted for one reason and one reason only: social media clout. Sure, Lauren is a lesbian, but nobody on Instagram needs to know that. All she has to do is make sure she gets eliminated before the finale, and she’ll be golden. Simple enough, right?
But neither Lauren nor Krystin could have anticipated the magnetic pull they would feel towards one another. After a wrestling date, sparks fly, and it becomes more and more difficult for the women to deny their feelings for one another. Is there room for lesbian love on a show as heteronormative as Hopelessly Devoted? Are Krystin and Lauren ready to be unapologetically themselves in front of the whole world?
What I loved most about Here for the Wrong Reasons is that I felt like I was really watching a season of The Bachelor as I was flipping through the pages of this book. There were dates. There were confessionals. There were women forming alliances with each other. Yes, there was a good bit of gossiping and speculating about who was (and wasn’t) really there for love. All that and I got a sweet romance story that I could really believe in. Lauren and Krystin’s chemistry is hot, and I contribute this to real-life couple/authors Paulsen and Wang’s chemistry on the page. I have to say Paulsen and Wang must be fans of reality TV in real life, too, because they really nailed the details and made this feel real.
Reality TV aficionados, it’s time to ditch The Bachelor and pick up Here for the Wrong Reasons. Sure, Hopelessly Devoted isn’t a real reality TV show, but this story has all the twists, turns, and drama of a good Bachelor season. And nobody had to cry on live TV! It’s a win, win, win.
Happy weekend reading, bibliophiles! Feel free to follow me on Instagram @emandhercat, and check out my other newsletters, The Fright Stuff and Book Radar!