People Like Her
A Novel
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3.9 • 188 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"Beyond being a brilliant skewering of social media and influencer culture, People Like Her is, quite simply, a damn good thriller . . . . The novel reads like Gone Girl on steroids in all the best ways.”— BookReporter
“Breathlessly fast, brilliantly original. Bravo, Ellery Lloyd!”—Clare Mackintosh, New York Times bestselling author of After the End
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Club, a razor-sharp, wickedly smart suspense debut about an ambitious influencer mom whose soaring success threatens her marriage, her morals, and her family’s safety.
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.
In this deeply addictive tale of psychological suspense, Ellery Lloyd raises important questions about technology, social media celebrity, and the way we live today. Probing the dark side of influencer culture and the perils of parenting online, People Like Her explores our desperate need to be seen and the lengths we’ll go to be liked by strangers. It asks what—and who—we sacrifice when make our private lives public, and ultimately lose control of who we let in. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With a million-plus Instagram followers, former fashion editor Emmy Jackson, the co-narrator of this unnerving debut from the pseudonymous Lloyd (husband-and-wife writing team Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos), is Britain's most famous Instamum. Emmy claims her Mamabare account offers an unfiltered view of life raising three-year-old Coco and five-week-old Bear, but Emmy's embittered husband and co-narrator, Dan, can attest that her posts contain about as much truth as the novel he published eight years ago. Still, without Emmy's endorsement deals, they couldn't pay their bills, so Dan (aka Papabare) keeps quiet and plays his part. Little do the Jacksons know, someone watching their lives unfold online deeply resents their "perfectly imperfect" existence, and is determined to destroy it. Some of the multilayered plot's more nefarious twists strain credulity, but clever red herrings, sharply drawn characters, and steadily mounting dread largely compensate. Lloyd dramatically highlights the artificiality of influencer culture and the toxicity of society's social media obsession.
Customer Reviews
Tone, Writing, Ending
I was very close to giving this book three stars but ultimately it comes down to this. The characters are unlikeable and unengaging until around 1/3 of the way into the book, the middle is almost flawless, and the end was mostly upsetting. However, this seems to be written to be a show/movie and I truly would prefer it that way/enjoyed it more by reading through that lens. It’s kind of like a “You” remix.