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She has everything she could ever want- money, fame, a huge following of young women who are obsessed with her every word- but she can't let go of the past.
I was surprised on the slant it took and when we first met Libby, I can’t say anymore without spoiling things. While reading this I kept thinking about a quote I've seen now and then-- "Life is the story we tell ourselves" --a phrase which has always struck me as lovely and poetic.You don't want to stop reading until you find out how it ends even though it's perfectly obvious from the outset that there won't be any real surprises in this she said she said story. This is by design—O’Neill has a talent for creating unlikable protagonists, and I think they have their place. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). Unfortunately none of the main characters appealed to me in any way and I did find their behaviour frustrating and, at times, repetitive.
It's not often that I can read a story with a VERY unlikeable main character and still enjoy the story. Samantha Miller is an influencer, she tells her adoring fans how to live their lives and has three million followers.And was Sam’s childhood really as dysfunctional as she has made it sound since leaving home all those years ago? I love this aspect of her writing and I think Idol is perfectly timed in terms of how it examines the subjectivity of memory, the power of cancelling celebrities and cancel culture in general when allegations are made. 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. Following the launch of her latest book Chaste, Samantha is pulled to one side by her manager in crisis mode.
She’s not easy to like but she’s very damaged and at times you feel sad then you feel angry at her behaviour and manipulation. Her first novel, Only Ever Yours , was released in 2014 and won the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, the Eilís Dillon Award for a First Book and the Bookseller 's inaugural YA Book Prize. Videos and reels like Observe While I Try on These 75 New Outfits, or Watch Me Obsessively Clean My House/Heat Up My dinner/Unbox Expensive Stuff I've Been Given For Free is big business these days and this story very much taps into that. I can see how they were all linked together, but I couldn’t help but feel that this resulted in a superficial overview, ticking off a multitude of themes, but lacking deeper substance.Both stories have governments that control their subjects through quite literally rewriting history as it suited their changing agendas. Sam's childhood best friend is claiming a sexual experience between the two of them, that Sam wrote about in an article, wasn't consensual and now Sam's whole career is teetering on the brink.
IDOL by Louise O’ Neill published with Bantam Press May 12th and is described as ‘riveting, compulsive and bold…interrogates our relationship with our heroes and explores the world of online influencers, asking how well we can ever really know those whose carefully curated profiles we follow online.I didn't want to be part of this spiral into utter and absolute desolation and chaos, I really didn't want to be.
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