I did it! We are seven days into September and I’ve actually read a book 🎉. After reading 10 books last month, I could feel a bit of a slump coming on.
Determined to push through, and make a start on my shockingly short TBR for September , I decided to pick up a genre I don’t usually read. Though I could’ve started the month with my chosen non-fiction book, I thought a thriller I bought on a whim might do the trick. Thriller is not a genre I usually read but I actually enjoyed People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd, despite the mixed reviews I’d seen.
Blurb
Followed by Millions, Watched by One
To her adoring fans, Emmy Jackson, aka @the_mamabare, is the honest “Instamum” who always tells it like it is.
To her skeptical husband, a washed-up novelist who knows just how creative Emmy can be with the truth, she is a breadwinning powerhouse chillingly brilliant at monetizing the intimate details of their family life.
To one of Emmy’s dangerously obsessive followers, she’s the woman that has everything—but deserves none of it.
As Emmy’s marriage begins to crack under the strain of her growing success and her moral compass veers wildly off course, the more vulnerable she becomes to a very real danger circling ever closer to her family.
My Thoughts
If ever there was a book that makes me want to delete all of my social media, it is this one.
Written by husband and wife duo Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos, the book follows ‘Instamum’ Emmy, her husband Dan and an unnamed figure (for most of the book) hellbent on ruining their seemingly perfect family life.
As with a lot of thrillers, there aren’t many likeable characters in this book. Emmy is a stereotypical Insta-famous type (I say as a so-called influencer myself, at least according to my friends 😂), concerned about following, how she looks and ensuring that everything is cookie cutter perfect. There were moments when I sort of liked her but most of her decisions left me shaking my head (first off, calling her children Coco and Bear??). Dan was the slightly better, though he also made so many mistakes and spent a good 50% of the book slagging his wife — the woman he loves (apparently??) — off.
Much like Emmy and Dan, the unnamed third character is frustrating. It took a while to get to the bottom of her reasoning for her obsession with the couple and, when I did, I understood her grudge but I think — as with most of the characters in this book — she took things a bit too far.
Though I didn’t like many of the characters, I still throughly enjoyed this book. It was an exhilarating cat-and-mouse style book with so many twists and turns. I’m not a thriller reader so I definitely didn’t predict where this book was going.
No spoilers, but I absolutely demand justice for Polly. She was the best character in the book and was treated so unfairly! This book just proved that, just when you think you’ve figured out who the “villain” is, you realise they’re all terrible people.
This might sound like a bad review but I throughly enjoyed People Like Her. It was fast paced and captivating, set in a world a lot of us know and featuring twists we might not see coming.
You can follow Ellery Lloyd on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
You can buy this book here.
Jen Rose Writes🌹 
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