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greatexpectations77's review
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
I really didn't like this one much. I got it from a LFL, and I don't think that I had read the author's writing before. It very much seems like Ms. Oyler was trying to say something really ~deep~ about social media and politics and whatever. What's interesting is that the reviews by readers show that it didn't hit the mark at all. The reviews by papers and critics say she was "skewering" our world. But is it possible that they just didn't get it and thought that that made it brilliant? Like I already know that I spend too much time on social media and that a lot of social justice is performative. Telling me that doesn't mean you discovered anything new. It's just patting yourself on the back for being obvious. No thanks at all.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Toxic relationship and Alcohol
Moderate: Death, Abandonment, and Car accident
Minor: Grief, Sexual content, Emotional abuse, and Bullying
Just skip it.morwenna's review
funny
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Grief
Minor: Death
kelsea's review
challenging
dark
funny
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Grief
Minor: Sexual assault
kayleyhyde's review against another edition
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Grief, Sexual content, and Cursing
Minor: Suicide and Sexual assault
sorrymom94's review
adventurous
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
sharp and funny
Content Warnings
Minor: Cursing, Death, Drug use, Grief, Toxic relationship, Sexual violence, and Sexual content
caseythereader's review
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Thanks to Catapult for the free copy of this book.
- FAKE ACCOUNTS is a book you're either going to love or hate, and I think where you fall likely hinges on how much time you've spent on Twitter in the last decade. It reads like a mashup of MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION and TRICK MIRROR.
- The stream of consciousness writing can get a little overwhelming, but it also perfectly evokes how it feels to get tunnel vision into your phone while endlessly scrolling for no reason.
- The narrator is deeply unlikable and so are many of the people she meets throughout the book. Nearly everyone is terrible or insufferable for one reason or another.
- This all sounds like I hated the book, but I actually loved it pretty intensely. I was cackling every few pages as Oyler both skewers online cultures and treats them as an integral component of the lives of millennials.
- FAKE ACCOUNTS is a book you're either going to love or hate, and I think where you fall likely hinges on how much time you've spent on Twitter in the last decade. It reads like a mashup of MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION and TRICK MIRROR.
- The stream of consciousness writing can get a little overwhelming, but it also perfectly evokes how it feels to get tunnel vision into your phone while endlessly scrolling for no reason.
- The narrator is deeply unlikable and so are many of the people she meets throughout the book. Nearly everyone is terrible or insufferable for one reason or another.
- This all sounds like I hated the book, but I actually loved it pretty intensely. I was cackling every few pages as Oyler both skewers online cultures and treats them as an integral component of the lives of millennials.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Car accident, Cursing, Death, Grief, Infidelity, Rape, Sexism, Sexual content, and Suicidal thoughts
questingnotcoasting's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
This turned out to be nothing like I was expecting but I mostly enjoyed it. It started as the story I imagined but soon changed into something quite different which can't really be described without spoilers. The unnamed protagonist is a compulsive liar, who is often irritating but somehow I never completely lost patience with her. It's mostly written in a conversational, stream of consciousness style but Oyler also plays around with structure. There's an amusing bit in the middle where she/the protagonist experiments with writing a fragmented novel.
It's definitely a strange book and I can understand the mixed reviews. For me there were some parts which dragged in the middle section, which to be fair is titled "Middle: (Nothing Happens)" but overall it was compelling enough that I read the second half in one sitting.
It's definitely a strange book and I can understand the mixed reviews. For me there were some parts which dragged in the middle section, which to be fair is titled "Middle: (Nothing Happens)" but overall it was compelling enough that I read the second half in one sitting.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death and Grief
kelseyland's review
dark
funny
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
All I want to do right now is read books about shitty people doing outrageous things so this one definitely fit the bill. Reminded me a lot of Elif Batuman's The Idiot even before I got to the shoutout so that was great, too. I simply could not stop reading this book.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Misogyny, Toxic relationship, Infidelity, Grief, and Death
bookish_sabrina's review
challenging
funny
informative
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
This is a deeply insular and meta novel about a women with a boatload of white privilege who learns that her boyfriend runs a popular white supremacist Instagram account. This does not compute with her understanding of him as a person, who is himself generally against social media and quite liberal. However, he also definitely seems like a fuckboy that the unnamed protagonist says with out of convenience and laziness more than anything else.
The book takes quite a turn when her boyfriend dies in a bicycle accident before she is able to dump him for good while she is at the Women's March in January 2016. This leads to her going to Berlin, where she spends about two-thirds of the novel.
She doesn't have great motivations for dropping everything and moving to Berlin. She justifies needing to process her feelings and discover herself, but she seems pretty uncommitted to doing the actual emotional labor of getting there.
This book is characterized by millennial ennui. Oyler channels the more disgusting and depressing factors of being a millennial who grew up on the internet. Oyler tows an impressive line of letting us know that she is in on the critique while the protagonist, who is herself writing this novel, is not. It really demonstrates the wishy-washy fatalism embodied by a lot of white millennials. This feeling is characterized exceptionally well in the line:
"...the popular turn to fatalism could be attributed to self-aggrandizement and an ignorance of history, history being characterized by the population's quickness to declare apocalypse finally imminent despite its permanently delayed arrival. We don't want to die, but we also don't want to do anything challenging, such as what living requires, so the volubility with which certain doom was discussed made a tedious kind of sense: the end of the world would let us have our cake, and eat it, too; we would have no choice but to die, our potential conveniently unreachable due to our collapse" (p. 6).
It is an excellent critique on performance. Being on social media is inherently performative, and also a place where we are forced to care about how we are performing in terms of likes and comments. This novel is also all about performance, as the protagonist is clearly trying to show us how smart and articulate she is about modern topics, while also putting on various performances for all of the people in her real life. This is especially well-embodied by the section where she goes on several Tinder dates while embodying the characteristics of different astrological signs on each one, which is perhaps the most millennial thing to have ever millennialed. Other very millennial moments: cycling through the same 3 social media tabs, talking about a skincare routine, hyping one's own search engine prowess, the incredible tension built up around the protagonist looking at her boyfriend's phone while he's sleeping, and lots of meditating on social media usage and its myriad of potential consequences, yet refusing to quit.
I didn't care for the ending, which left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied. It was one of those things where there either needed to be more or none at all. But I found this book challenging and funny. The prose felt dense, full of insights into modern life. Not sure how well this book will age because it is so incredibly "now," but I feel it does really encapsulate what it feels like to be alive right now. Maybe that will be useful or interesting to observe for readers a few years down the line.
Opening line: "Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media."
The book takes quite a turn when
She doesn't have great motivations for dropping everything and moving to Berlin. She justifies needing to process her feelings and discover herself, but she seems pretty uncommitted to doing the actual emotional labor of getting there.
This book is characterized by millennial ennui. Oyler channels the more disgusting and depressing factors of being a millennial who grew up on the internet. Oyler tows an impressive line of letting us know that she is in on the critique while the protagonist, who is herself writing this novel, is not. It really demonstrates the wishy-washy fatalism embodied by a lot of white millennials. This feeling is characterized exceptionally well in the line:
"...the popular turn to fatalism could be attributed to self-aggrandizement and an ignorance of history, history being characterized by the population's quickness to declare apocalypse finally imminent despite its permanently delayed arrival. We don't want to die, but we also don't want to do anything challenging, such as what living requires, so the volubility with which certain doom was discussed made a tedious kind of sense: the end of the world would let us have our cake, and eat it, too; we would have no choice but to die, our potential conveniently unreachable due to our collapse" (p. 6).
It is an excellent critique on performance. Being on social media is inherently performative, and also a place where we are forced to care about how we are performing in terms of likes and comments. This novel is also all about performance, as the protagonist is clearly trying to show us how smart and articulate she is about modern topics, while also putting on various performances for all of the people in her real life. This is especially well-embodied by the section where she goes on several Tinder dates while embodying the characteristics of different astrological signs on each one, which is perhaps the most millennial thing to have ever millennialed. Other very millennial moments: cycling through the same 3 social media tabs, talking about a skincare routine, hyping one's own search engine prowess, the incredible tension built up around the protagonist looking at her boyfriend's phone while he's sleeping, and lots of meditating on social media usage and its myriad of potential consequences, yet refusing to quit.
I didn't care for the ending, which left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied. It was one of those things where there either needed to be more or none at all. But I found this book challenging and funny. The prose felt dense, full of insights into modern life. Not sure how well this book will age because it is so incredibly "now," but I feel it does really encapsulate what it feels like to be alive right now. Maybe that will be useful or interesting to observe for readers a few years down the line.
Opening line: "Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media."
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Grief, and Sexual content
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