Shot Through The Heart

by Matt Cain

[Leah]

As soon as I heard about Matt Cain’s debut novel, I thought it sounded right up my street. It’s about celebrities – you’d be surprised how rare that is, and not just any old Kardashian celebrity, it’s about famous actors and actresses, which is my absolute favourite! It has a delightful looking cover – showing a woman (presumably Mia), with the title in a pink font and it just screams the perfect summer read! And, finally, the piece de resistance… The title is the opening lyrics to a Bon Jovi song. Not just any Bon Jovi song, but my favourite Bon Jovi song and the song that features on Barney’s ‘Get Psyched’ mix on How I Met Your Mother, You Give Love A Bad Name (and which I now have stuck in my head!). DING DING DING, we have a winner! So Shot Through The Heart had a lot of pressure on it before I’d even started it, but it more than lived up to my hype!

Shot Through The Heart was such an enjoyable novel! It wasn’t just about Mia and Leo’s relationship, which was such a pleasure to read about, but it was a story about living for who you really are, being true to yourself and (to some extent) not letting what people think rule your actions. The theme running through the novel was love. Love in all its various forms – be it Mia and Leo’s burgeoning, surprising and unexpected love, to Ronnie and Rosie’s fiery, always arguing love, to Billy Spencer, heart-throb leading actor, being loved by his fans, after not knowing a lot of love in his life. There’s lots of love going around in the novel, and I found it quite sweet and I was rather desperate for everybody to get their happy ending, even Hector, Mia’s sweet-but-unassuming and rather naive assistant.

I very much enjoyed getting to know the characters – books rarely focus on celebrities, perhaps because they’re worried their readers won’t be able to relate to such famous, perfect (at least to the public’s eyes) people, but Matt Cain really delivers on characters we can really care about. Mia is such a lovely, sweet lady! Despite the novel being written in the third-person, I really felt connected to Mia, which takes a talented writer to pull off, and I felt personally connected not just to Mia, but to all the characters! Sure, Mia and Billy might be famous and have the world at their feet, but if this novel shows anything, it shows that famous people have insecurities too, and want to be loved, too, and, at the end of the day, they’re just like you and me, except for the paparazzi constantly hounding them, of course. Mia and Leo’s love story is very much the Romeo and Juliet of the modern age – Leo’s day job is hardly conducive to a celebrity relationship, especially when he’s taken pictures previously of said celebrity, but their romance was sweet, and I sort of liked how they met when Leo was trying to take pictures of Mia eating a burger and he bargains a date out of the whole thing, hardly expecting it to become what it does…

This was such a great, unexpected novel! Obviously being a debut I didn’t have any clue how Matt was as a writer, what to expect from his novels, but I was massively impressed, even with all the hype I had added on to it all by myself! I raced through the book, feeling immediately connected to it from page one, which is a very rare occurrence, and takes a very good writer to do that. Matt Cain is a fantastic new writer, and he’s going to go far – he’s massively talented and it’s quite hard to believe Shot Through The Heart is his debut novel as it’s immense. It covers all bases, introduces us to some fine, fine characters and manages to keep all the balls juggling in the air. The synopsis may make it seem as though the novel is just about Mia and Leo, but it’s about so much more than them, and we get to meet so many great, distinguishable characters, the stand-out for me being Billy Spencer, who has had an awful beginning to his life, but has made his life into a success, despite everything. I can’t wait to see what Matt Cain writes next, because I will certainly be buying it because I loved Shot Through The Heart, it was a wonderful novel!