The Influencers
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A social media influencer's empire is burned to the ground—literally. The top suspects? The five daughters who made her famous.
“A witty and razor-sharp whodunit that will leave you both satisfied and challenged . . . A gorgeous, gloriously scathing story.”—Ashley Herring Blake, author of Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date
What do you really know about the people you’ve made famous?
“Mother May I” Iverson has spent the past twenty-five years building a massively successful influencer empire with endearing videos featuring her five mixed-race daughters. But the girls are all grown up now, and the ramifications of having their entire childhoods commodified start to spill over into public view, especially in light of the pivotal question: Who killed May’s newlywed husband and then torched her mansion to cover it up?
April is a businesswoman feuding with her mother over intellectual property; twins June and July are influencers themselves, threatening to overtake May’s spotlight; January is a theater tech who steers clear of her mother and the limelight; and the youngest . . . well, March has somehow completely disappeared. As the days pass post-murder, everyone has an opinion—the sisters, May, a mysterious “friend of the family,” and the collective voice of the online audience watching the family’s every move—with suspicion flying every direction.
A campy and escapist exploration of race, gender, sexuality, and class, The Influencers is an evisceration of influencer culture and how alienating traditional expectations can be, ripe for the current moment when the first generation of children made famous by their parents are, now, all grown up—and looking for retribution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In YA author McLemore's uneven adult debut (after Flawless Girls), a successful influencer becomes embroiled in scandal when her husband is murdered and her home set afire, most likely to conceal the evidence. The question of who murdered August Iverson drives much of the narrative, which is told from multiple perspectives, including those of momfluencer May, her fans, her five daughters, and a mysterious man known throughout most of the novel as Luke Sweatshirt. May, for her part, is focused on remaining connected to her audience ("The first rule of weathering a scandal was to carry on, business as usual," McLemore writes), and as she continues to post, the Iversons reveal themselves to be just as sinister as they are glamorous, especially after the disappearance of May's second daughter, March. McLemore thoroughly skewers influencer culture, revealing the resentments and tensions simmering beneath a picture-perfect veneer. Unfortunately, the characters are a bit too cartoonishly drawn, and despite a juicy premise, the pace is far too plodding. There's not enough here to hold the reader's interest.
