Social Media Dystopia

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This is an incredibly smart book about a world that seems, on its surface, to be incredibly stupid. Megan Angelo does a deep dive into the vapid, self-obsessive world of reality shows and social media darlings, which are easy targets for derision. And at first it seems like she's jumping in on the pile-on, turning the full force of her sarcasm and irony on the image-obsessed.

But the influencer world isn't so easy to explain or wholly dismiss as people want to think, and Angelo really understands that. Before long, she starts to acknowledge all the complications and compromises that lurk beneath such a surface-level world, and she really makes us care about the characters trying to stay on top of that glitzy soap-bubble world, rather than sink into obscurity. Orla, Floss, and Marlow are all misled, seduced, and betrayed by fame; and they also do their share of misleading, seducing, and betraying. They're each such wonderful, messy characters, living in worlds that are just as messy as our own, and saying such real things about it. Start to finish, this book just _gets_ it: gets the allure, gets the horror, and gets all the in-between stuff that's so much more than any post or tweet or filtered pic.