“The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.”
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. She’s married to a senator’s son who is a handsome cowboy, her charming farmhouse is rustic, and her six children are all so perfect and delightful. Natalie is an influencer with millions of followers whose father-in-law is currently running for president and wants to use her influence to get him to the white house. She never discloses the workers on the farm, the producers behind the scenes, or the nannies that keep everything running. She hides the microwave and the industrial grade fridges and ovens and performs for the camera. One day, she wakes up and she’s living a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband and her children are different but familiar. Her kitchen has no electricity, and her children are dirty and strange and there are no nannies.
I think this is one book where the premise was so much better than the actual execution. What I was expecting was not what I got. The way this book was marketed was very misleading and even though I still rolled with the punches as they came, the reading experience ended up being unsatisfying. But I also like the way the main character Natalie was written. She drove me crazy because sometimes she would have so much insight about the disparity between men and women, but she would never come to the right conclusions. She just kept digging in her heels even when a smart woman like her should have pivoted. I never felt a lot of dislike for her, in fact, I actually felt such compassion for her and was sad to see her life just go downhill.
Natalie’s descent into paranoia was hard to read about. She became so resentful of other women and the commenters, and she would make up elaborate stories about how horrible their lives were compared to the perfect life she had curated. At points, it seemed that she had forgotten that her life on social media was not actually the life she was actually living. The writer traps us inside her mind as it unravels into chaos, and it was not a nice place to be at all. Nothing in her life is grounded and every experience is filtered through the lens of how it would appear on social media. She completely surrenders her life to the new producer who enters her life and even though there were so many red flags, she completely ignores them just because of the number on social media.
When Natalie wakes up in the actual trad life she’s been curating online and when we find out how she got there and what the premise actually what, it leaves me so disappointed. Because you’re left to wonder if Natalie is actually a manipulative social media mastermind or just a mentally ill woman who is trapped in the identity she has built and can no longer recognize the real world from the one she has curated. The author completely denies any responsibility of what kind of story she’s telling. She expects the audience to decide what Natalie is. You start to wonder if this is a book about an influencer or just a book about how mental illness shows up in women. She completely gives over the responsibility to the audience to decide what type of book they want to be and I don’t know if this is genius or if this is a way for the author to escape all criticisms about labelling large groups of people – Christians, trad wives, influencers etc.
Eventually, after going through the chaos that is Natalie’s mind and ultimately arriving to an end that doesn’t wrap up with a bow. I think this is one book that is going to stay with the reader whether you enjoy it or not. I ended up giving this 3 stars on Goodreads.
Leggy
TwoNightStands 