Followers is not about social media. Followers is about relationships. Followers by Meghan Angelo is about three women and their connectedness. It goes back-and-forth between the time before the spill and the time after. Floss is A girl who wants to be famous for the sake of being famous, think Kardashian famous. Orla is a blogger who just lost the one person she covers for Lady-ish, a gossip site. They have been so wrapped up in their world that they didn’t realize they live together. And they didn’t realize how they could help each other. Marlow’s timeline happens 30 years after. She grew up in a town where being an influencer was a government job. Streaming your life 24-7, and a network that told you what to eat, what to wear and when to have a baby.
One of the most intriguing things about this book is that it fools you into thinking that it is a commentary on our current Instagram obsessed society. It’s not about that as much as it’s about what that society does to us, affecting our treatment of others. There were no clear villains, just people who sometimes do bad things. That made it all the more relatable.
This book is firmly in women’s fiction but at times, it attempted suspense, intrigue and complex world-building that fell flat for me. As much as I enjoyed the relationships, the women’s voices were not diverse amongst themselves for me to tell the difference when I picked up the book at random. The thoughts they were having were different but the writing style was much the same. I think this book suffers a similar fate as Vox which is also had a great premise but the execution was poor. Usually, it doesn’t take me a week to read a 400-page book and this book I started two weeks ago and just finished.
The world-building of society after the Spill made little sense to me. The fallout was realistic but Constellation was just LA but with cameras everywhere. I didn’t know what the purpose of it and it wasn’t explained well. Some portions of the technology were extremely convenient. The primary issue with speculative fiction is that it needs to be a natural progression of human behavior that leads to the “after”. The after was interesting but felt primarily disjointed. I enjoyed Orla’s chapters far more than Marlow’s because it was almost painful to see her realize how sheltered she really was. Because Marlow was older, it felt unrealistic.
The diversity seemed like it was shoved in there, but even then they were European, which made no sense because of the places this story takes place in. New York and Atlantic City. It’s almost like this new world doesn’t have any people who don’t look like the author.
As much as I wanted to like this book, I just didn’t. It didn’t keep my attention and the faux-epilogue in the future tense was just an attempt to be different. There are quite a few books coming out in Winter 2019/2020 that deal with the same subject matter that are a little more interesting.
One of the most intriguing things about this book is that it fools you into thinking that it is a commentary on our current Instagram obsessed society. It’s not about that as much as it’s about what that society does to us, affecting our treatment of others. There were no clear villains, just people who sometimes do bad things. That made it all the more relatable.
This book is firmly in women’s fiction but at times, it attempted suspense, intrigue and complex world-building that fell flat for me. As much as I enjoyed the relationships, the women’s voices were not diverse amongst themselves for me to tell the difference when I picked up the book at random. The thoughts they were having were different but the writing style was much the same. I think this book suffers a similar fate as Vox which is also had a great premise but the execution was poor. Usually, it doesn’t take me a week to read a 400-page book and this book I started two weeks ago and just finished.
The world-building of society after the Spill made little sense to me. The fallout was realistic but Constellation was just LA but with cameras everywhere. I didn’t know what the purpose of it and it wasn’t explained well. Some portions of the technology were extremely convenient. The primary issue with speculative fiction is that it needs to be a natural progression of human behavior that leads to the “after”. The after was interesting but felt primarily disjointed. I enjoyed Orla’s chapters far more than Marlow’s because it was almost painful to see her realize how sheltered she really was. Because Marlow was older, it felt unrealistic.
The diversity seemed like it was shoved in there, but even then they were European, which made no sense because of the places this story takes place in. New York and Atlantic City. It’s almost like this new world doesn’t have any people who don’t look like the author.
As much as I wanted to like this book, I just didn’t. It didn’t keep my attention and the faux-epilogue in the future tense was just an attempt to be different. There are quite a few books coming out in Winter 2019/2020 that deal with the same subject matter that are a little more interesting.