It's Sam's word against Lisa's - so who gets to tell the story Whose 'truth' is really a lie 'You put yourself on that pedestal, Samantha. It's also an acute deep dive into the influencer lifestyle and image, social media toxicity, performative wokeness and cancel culture. As a social media storm erupts, things deteriorate as Sam tries to reconnect with Lisa and Josh to confirm her truth.

Another fantastic book from Louise O'Neill - this had everything I wanted in a book looking at celebrity and cancel culture that I haven't received in other books and I loved how Sam's character was built up as this wellness influencer (think Brené Brown meets Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop), but then over the chapters all the cracks and ugliness in her perfect exterior started to shine through. It is also an examination of sexual abuse, and especially how people construct narratives for their entire life. There’s tension, it’s uncomfortable, you wince, you groan and it’s quite raw at times with some scenes making you gasp in shock. Was this what it meant to be an adult, everyone reframing their childhood experiences to paint themselves as the victim? She's perfectly portrayed, from her pick n' mix spirituality and clean eating, to her insistence on speaking "her truth".I enjoyed every page and when I was forced to put it down I couldn't wait to get back to it as soon as possible - always the sign of a great read.

This is very much a she said/he said/she said novel and you have no idea who to believe or who is the credible one with much of this being played out on social media (can you hear me groaning? The start of the book is cracking, drunk rock star passed out in a heap on the heroine’s lawn, what does the heroine do, hose him down.

This is a clever, zeitgiesty read, which will play with your emotions as if they were scrabble tiles and give you characters that you love then hate on the turn of a page but you won't be able to stop reading.

Fresh off the press is an essay she opened describing her formative sexual relationship with her best friend. Determined to speak her truth and bare all to her adoring fans, she’s written an essay about her sexual awakening as a teenager, with her female best friend, Lisa. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. As her world begins to unravel, she flees her life on New York’s Upper West Side and heads for her suburban hometown and tracks down her high-school best friend – the one accusing her.This is by design—O’Neill has a talent for creating unlikable protagonists, and I think they have their place.

Our MC has suffered through sexual violence, but since she lied about how it happened, it will only be used against her. That was one of the most emotionally difficult books I’ve ever read, and it really felt like reading about a real life experience. I found the writing gripping, and I enjoyed the complexity of Sam and the many uncomfortable layers of the situation made it feel realistic.I do think that the novel could have been cut back a little as I started to glaze over as I read certain chapters. Her obvious and violent struggles with her mental illnesses are used for shock value and to make her an abuser who doesn't know she is one. She is an immediately unsympathetic character and the story peels back her many layers (and issues) until we get to the (unsurprising truth) at the centre of the story. Everything is presented through this lense of contempt and bullshit to build tension that O'Neill obviously didn't know how else to build, to then falls entirely flat in the last reveal.