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We were lucky enough to get an advance copy of Laura Barnard’s third instalment of the Brighton Babes series. The book is out on 1st November 2018.

Ok, stick with it, it starts bad but gets better. 🙂 Both the review and the book.

“Operation ‘Bagging Alice’ is in progress.”

Not overly keen on this start but hey let’s see what happens. I can’t wait to see more of this guy! … (That’s sarcasm… there’s a lot of that in the book too).

Alice is in a pickle, whereby she needs a room mate or she will have to forfeit her lovely, expensive, flat in Brighton. Tom ‘Manwhore’ Madden needs somewhere to stay after landing a new job, in a town he doesn’t live in. It goes without saying that these two end up as housemates, and as the title suggests, Tom goes about trying to bag Alice. He bets his mate that he can bag her, and as you’ll probably guess, he falls for her for real causing all kinds of problems.

The amount of swearing and crude sex discriptions in this book is insane! I didn’t think of myself as a prude, but maybe now, I shall reconsider that notion.

I haven’t read the first two in the series, and it looks as though I should have done. From the start there is obviously something between Tom and Alice, for her to feel such anger toward him. She is vile to him when the story begins, and he isn’t so nice back. They have a small close knit group of friends so they have to get along to a degree, but they swear at eachother, slag eachother off behind their backs, they generally just are not meant to be friends, let alone anything else.

The over use of the word ‘tool’ and ‘neanderthal’ in the first couple of pages was just something else! Never have I seen them so often repeated to describe the guys she doesn’t like! Luckily for Alice, I agree with her. Tom is a MASSIVE tool!

“Plus, those bitches are hot.”

How is this allowed? Surely people don’t think like this? Tom says the most derogatory things about women, his attitude sucks. I realise the point of the book, was to let us know how gross he is, and what a ‘manwhore’ he is, so that when he finally wins Alice round (or does he?) we will think he has turned a massive corner. But I don’t believe men think like that. I refuse to believe men think like that. I certainly don’t know any that do.

At about 30% I think I had either got used to the swearing/sex/general rudeness, or it had calmed down a little, because I started to forget about those bits and steam through. That’s not necessarily to say I was enjoying it, but I wasn’t stopping reading either. There are some funny bits. The bits with Pickle are pretty funny and cute.

I didn’t like Alice as much as I maybe should have done. But I am intrigued by some of the other characters, so I think I may go back to the first two books in the series and check those out.

By the end, I realised I actually wanted to know what happened, and so therefore I must have enjoyed it! It is well written, it has a good pace to it. I read “Bagging Alice’ really quickly, so I must have liked it, right?

Overall, I think that if you are a fan of this genre of book, then you will love this. If like me, you are an occasional dipper-inner of these types of books, then you may be pleasantly surprised, but not completely swayed. A solid 3 stars, well done Laura Barnard, and as I say I will definitely be going back to the first two books to check in with the peripheral characters.

Becca x