Breakaway Books

Authored by Kate Fagan; Published January 2025; Romance

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

The Three Lives of Cate Kay was a delightful surprise for me. There was something so pure about the friendship at the heart of the book that I couldn’t help but love it.

The Three Lives of Cate Kay is the story of Annie, a young girl who runs away from her New York home after a horrible accident cripples her best friend, Amanda. Annie anonymously authors a bestselling novel and falls in love with the woman starring in the film adaptation but never quite outruns the guilt of abandoning Amanda. Thanks to the machinations of her and her lover’s agents, Annie runs away once more, this time from her lover, Ryan, and isolates herself in Charleston from everyone and everything she knows and loves—but can she find her way home again?

Amanda and Annie’s friendship is the driving force of this novel, and the author absolutely masterfully captures all the tiny details that make up best friendship between two young girls. All of the inside jokes, the wordless understanding, even the constant testing of the relationship between the two make for a deeply relatable and lovable bond. Annie’s moment of great shame—her abandonment of Amanda—makes a kind of sense through the lens of the friendship, a tie so strong that is struggles mightily against Annie’s limitless thirst for more and her desire to just forget such a tragedy happening to Amanda. I like to think we can all relate to the strong, perhaps irresistible, desire to run away from a reality that we want to deny. 

I reveled in the passion of the relationships throughout the novel. Annie’s girlfriend/manager, Sidney, stands out to me as a true villain, manipulative to the point of malevolence, but no less passionate than any of the more heroic characters. Sidney’s desire to control Annie leads to some of Annie’s most desolate moments, and while Annie is quick to forgive, I certainly was not. Ryan, Annie’s lover, is what we all want a celebrity to be: very nearly a regular human being, trying to find the romantic passion all of us are looking for in life, and indifferent to fame. The peeks we get into her filming of Annie’s novel, The Very Last, are very fun, if only because the novel’s premise is escapist to the core.

The Three Lives of Cate Kay is full of pure, passionate love. Enjoy all the beauty of it.