This was one of my Amazon First Reads choices for February.

Phelan does a great job of capturing influencer culture, from the obsession with brand names to the addiction to social media numbers. Yes, it is annoying how often Mickey brings these things up and rattles them off – but that is the entire point. While I’ll admit that I don’t know a lot about the behind-the-scenes side of things, everything that happens feels believable and like it could be part of a real person’s experience. Nothing is sugarcoated here, to the point where there are a large number of content warnings that come into play, but to gloss over any of them would do the book and the characters a disservice, and I appreciate that Phelan doesn’t look away from some really disturbing scenes.

That being said, I found that there were definitely areas that could do with some improvement. The biggest for me is the sheer amount of summary – there is so much of it in between scenes, and the paragraphs end up being long and rambly. At first, I thought that this has something to do with Mickey’s voice and desire to keep the reader at an arm’s length, but by the end I realized that that isn’t the case here – the entire epilogue is a summary, and honestly makes the rest of the book worse for it. If Phelan is attempting to have Mickey thinly veil lies with these summaries, that’s one thing, but it wasn’t clear to me that that was what was going on here; if you’re going to execute something like that, you really have to nail it, and it clearly didn’t work for me.

Most of my other critiques would likely be solved with more attention to scene: everything with Julia and Blake, and the italicized sections about “the girl,” to name a couple. I don’t mind having questions by the end of a book – in fact, I prefer it – but when they start to pile up rapidly and many of them have to do with character, that tells me that something is amiss. Either making Mickey’s intentions with the summarized scenes more clear, or just providing more active scenes would do a lot of the heavy-lifting for these.

I spent some time trying to decipher how I feel about this book, and ultimately I think I fall on the “meh” side of the scale. It definitely kept me reading to the end, but there is nothing earth-shattering here. And perhaps there doesn’t have to be – I’m not a big thriller/suspense reader, so for me this was a nice change of pace from my usual reads. But for those who devour the genre, this may feel more like trodding a well-worn path.