Social Media and Terrible Characters - my review of People Like Her

Oct 8, 2021
4 min read

Hello pals! It has been quite a while since my last post. I was so confident that I would be able to write one post a week, but life just caught up to me. September has been a crazy month: I finished my MA dissertation, and with it I finished university, I took a bit of a break and went to see my friends in London, I started looking for jobs... I still have not found a job - I am looking and it is a struggle - but I definitely have a lot more free time now, which means being able to work on some of my projects that have been a bit neglected!

Today's post is a review of People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd. It is a thriller novel that focuses on the life of Emmy, a mom influencer on Instagram, whose entire career is based on uplifting mothers. However, it soon becomes obvious that Emmy is not as genuine as she pretends to be, and that the online life is not always a positive experience. When a mysterious person starts to follow Emmy and her family, wil she be able to realise the dangers of putting yourself online?

I have mixed feelings about this novel. On the one hand, I liked the plot, I was intrigued by the story as soon as I saw the book in the shops, but on the other hand, there were so many things that made it hard to truly enjoy the story.

Questionable characters, questionable motives

I think that my biggest issue with the story was the fact that the main character is insufferable. She is self-centered, a bad spouse, and quite frankly, a bad mother. If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen that after only 30 pages, I was already saying that I did not like Emmy, which is honestly a record I think. It was not even that feeling where the character is morally grey, and you slowly learn to like them. From beginning to finish, I could not bring myself to care about Emmy, which in turn made it hard to care about what happens to her and her children. Since half of the book is told from her perspective (the other from her husband's), it almost felt like her children were not real, or at least that we were not supposed to empathise with them.

I think that Emmy's character was on purpose, and that readers are supposed to not like her, but I think that it gave a bad image of people on Instagram. I am not naive enough to think that everyone is genuine online, influencers are business people, but I am also not pessimist enough to think that a mumstagrammer (as they call it in the book), has so little care for her children. I think that I am a bit over the trope of people online being narcissits and overall terrible people.

That being said, Emmy's terrible behaviour does not justify the mystery-person's need for 'revenge'. This is a spoiler-free review, so I will not be telling you what the motive is, but my god, I thought it was a really bad one. The person after Emmy's family has little to no personallity and even then it is hard to believe that this is the real reason why they are doing this. It would make more sense if it were just a crazy stalker jealous of Emmy's success.

That being said, I still found the book enjoyable to read, and pretty fast-paced if that is what you're looking for.

Influencers and social media

The main idea of the novel is that posting your life online has consequences. While it is exaggerated for the sake of the story, it still touches on important aspects that influencers and content creators have to face. As we move further into the story, we can see that Emmy's life online is not as easy as she tries to make it be, and that while a lot of the people who reach out are genuine fans who have been touched by her content, she still faces many negative comments, the inevitable creepy DMs and stalkers.

For the most part, I felt like the book was a huge warning label for social media: that we should not post about our lives online, that it only attracts negativity, that our personal photos get stolen, and that there is always a creep around the corner stalking you. I understand that it all needs to be dramatised for the sake of the plot, and that it would not be a thriller without it, but it was still very exaggerated.

What I did enjoy, however, was the accurate portrayal of influencer events, and the way you could easily picture Emmy's online posts, as they were described like actual mumstagram posts (yes, i do follow some mumstagrammers and do know what these posts look like).

Overall, this felt like a three star book for me. I did enjoy it, it was a good page-turner, and I liked the overall atmosphere of the book, but there were too many things that rubbed me the wrong way for me to fully enjoy the book. I would have loved to see a more positive portrayal of social media and maybe have at least one character to root for (other than the children who barely speak).

Have you read this book? What did you think? I would love to hear what you have to say about it! I am trying to read a bit more thrillers this month - after all, it is spooky season y'all - so you may see other reviews either on here or on my Instagram. As usual, you can find my online at @a_spoonful_of_juliette if you fancy a chat!

Until next time xx