By Megan Thomas
While I think you should probably read it and will likely enjoy the thoughts it plants in your brain, I can’t say I’d urge you to drop everything to do so, which seems incredibly contradictory…
The premise is interesting, the twists are consistently jaw-dropping, it’s very contemporary and politically topical (with a pinch of salt given it was published in 2021, but that’s my/my TBR’s fault not the book’s), but I did think it went on for longer than was necessary. I really was quite ready to finish it.
I listened to the audiobook, which enhanced the way we are thrown into the action of the novel (somewhat ironically, because the pace really slows down after this). So, from the get-go, we are complicit in our narrator’s quest to snoop through her boyfriend’s phone in the hopes of putting her finger on why their relationship is falling apart. While she doesn’t know what she is expecting to find, it wasn’t that he’s a very popular, anonymous internet conspiracy theorist.
This revelation takes place almost instantly but remarkably, is barely what the novel is about, because this is just the first of many surprises that will change not only how our protagonist perceives her relationship, but how she perceives herself (and in turn, how we perceive her as the reader).
This initial discovery, and the recollections it evokes as well as the eventual journey of self-discovery it triggers, beg the questions: Do we ever really know anyone? Does it matter if we do? Is the internet the only place we can have fake personas, or is it endemic in modern society where it is so easy to create personal narratives that we gaslight ourselves into believing?
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