Bea is a popular plus size fashion blogger who, after years of pining after her best guy friend, has sworn off dating altogether. One night, after her weekly viewing of Main Squeeze, Bea drunkenly posts a rant about her favorite show, calling it out for its lack of diversity, especially when it comes to body type. Her piece goes mega-viral, and suddenly the producer of Main Squeeze is on the phone - would Bea like to be the next star of the show?
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ONE TO WATCH is both a love letter to and hate mail for The Bachelor, which is exactly where I find my own feelings about the show. I love it, I hate it, I wish it would do better in terms of race, sexuality, gender, size, and on and on. This book tackles a lot of that (I do wish it had done more around race, I kept entirely forgetting that one of the suitors was supposed to be Black) and with Main Squeeze making this pivot in the book, I very nearly got the version of The Bachelor that I wish existed.
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It also covered the publicity machine around the show - everything from online articles to transcripts of podcasts discussing episodes - in a way that I think is probably pretty close to how things would actually play out if The Bachelor cast a woman of size as the lead. Additionally, I was totally surprised by a few of the plot twists - not easy to pull off when your readers are probably Bachelor devotees who know all the tricks! The one thing about this book that I would say was not true to life was that Bea has thoughtful conversations of substance with her suitors!
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Content warnings: fatphobia, body dysmorphia, misogyny, sexual assault, doxxing, cheating, parental abandonment.