Release date: October 26, 2021

Publisher: Harper Audio

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Synopsis:

In this raucous psychological thriller, a millennial office worker finds relief from her crippling ennui in the embrace of a cliquey fan club, until she discovers the group of women is bound together by something darker than devotion.

Day after day our narrator, a gloomy millennial, searches for meaning beyond her vacuous job at a women’s lifestyle website—entering text into a computer system while she watches their beauty editor unwrap box after box of perfectly packaged bits of happiness. Then, one night at a dive bar, she hears a message in the newest single by child-actor-turned-international-pop-star Adriana Argento, and she is struck. Soon she loses herself to the online fandom, a community whose members feverishly track Adriana’s every move.

When a colleague notices the extent of her obsession, she’s invited to join an enigmatic group of adult Adriana superfans who call themselves the Ivies and worship her music in witchy, candlelit listening parties. As the narrator becomes more entrenched in the group, she gets closer to uncovering the sinister secrets that bind them together—while simultaneously losing her grip on reality.

With caustic wit and hypnotic writing, this unsparingly critical thrill ride through millennial life examines all that is wrong in our celebrity-obsessed internet age, and how easy it is to lose yourself in it.

Review:

Do you ever finish a book and wonder what in the hell you just read? And not in a good way? That’s what happened with me here. My whole experience with this book was bizarre, on the one hand I listened to it in a day so there was definitely something compulsive about it but on the other hand it wasn’t exactly an enjoyable experience. I really liked the premise and found the whole idea of being obsessed with a celebrity fascinating but something in the execution was lacking. The whole thing felt disjointed, I was missing a solid connection to the plot and the characters, the narrator is never named so I dont think that helped. I will say that had I read instead of listened to this I don’t think I would’ve finished so audio is the way to go but overall this was a miss for me.

Overall rating: 2/5

Thanks to the publisher for my review copy.