B (9:20)
Well, I love that. I also loved my latest read, which is Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg. I okay this I think I actually brought as a somewhere. I talked about this before it came out. Maybe it was a shelf edition, I think. But anyway, the book is about a woman. Her name is Del and Dell is a mess. Del is barely keeping it together. She's behind on rent, she dropped out of NYU and her student loans are coming due. She has this perpetual stomach pain. But worst of all is that her younger sister Daisy is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. And she, in the very beginning of the book, loses her job. That's right in the synopsis. And ends up sort of selling plant propagation, plant propagations to trust fund kids to try and get by. That's not really doing it for her though. So she decides to impulsively start a 24 hour live stream to fundraise for private life support for Daisy. And she gets on camera and ends up being really, really good at it. She's sort of mean to everybody. She loves her blocking people and there's a market for it. People you know are there and they sort of come to fall in love with her online Persona and end up giving her donations. And she's sort of getting more and more famous and chasing that high because I guess on this platform you get rankings, right? And she's sort of like, oh my gosh, I've cracked. You know, her goal is to crack 100,000 to sort of. Because the more visibility you have, of course, the more money you could raise. She then discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food and decides to sort of work with her subscribers to eat hotter and hotter peppers and eventually works her way up to one of the hottest peppers on earth, the Carolina Reaper. The problem is though, one of the people that is following her on her account is a troll and he is threatening to do some things that, you know, wouldn't be great for her. This is narrated over seven chapters. So she is online for 24 hours a day for seven days in order to try and raise money. Her big thing is she just wants one, one more week with her sister on private life support. And I think she has to raise something like $14,000 to get there. This book, okay, I loved it. I really, really did the right. It's a debut and the writing was so fantastic because you know how people say I want the author to show us and not tell us. That is definitely what this author did. She dropped you into the action immediately in the very first couple pages, she's getting fired from her job, and you don't know all of what's going on. You don't know all of her backstory or why her sister's in a coma from the beginning, but you find out along the way. And I just thought it was really, really well constructed. Del is such an interesting character to follow. She is a jerk, and she knows it, and yet she's still endearing. Like, it's really interesting because she could have been this very unlikable character. And at certain points, I wanted to shake her, but also I was like, I cannot look away from her. I just had to figure out what the end game was. Like, how is she going to end this? Like, is she going to raise enough money for her sister? What's going on? And there was, like, a lot of elements of suspense, like, a lot of different times throughout her seven days where I was like, how's this going to end? She would just do things that would shock me. And it sort of felt very authentic. Like, this character felt like somebody that was real that I could know in real life. I love that the author explored these niche worlds, like this live cast. I didn't know about this type of part of the Internet. I also love that she explored peppers. Like, I learned a lot about Hot Peppers, which was really fun, and I ended up in it. You're. You're hearing a lot of the chatters, so, you know, you come to recognize their usernames. And I started to get really attached to them as well. Like, at one point, she wants to block one of the ones that has been with her since the beginning. And I was like, no, don't do that. Like, I want to keep her around, but I thought this was great. There's a lot of different themes that this book is able to explore. And I will say, it's. It's pretty dark. It's not a light, fun romp. It does have dark elements like grief and voyeurism, self flagellation, and parasocial relationships. I thought she did such a good job exploring all of these different things. She also talked and sort of demonstrated the impact that online Personas can have. And, like, I'm reading this as a person that has an online platform, and I'm like, gosh, I wonder how different I am from my podcast voice and from my online Persona and, like, how I am in everyday life. Hopefully it's very similar. I think it is, but it was just very, very interesting to think about. I loved it. I loved this book. I would totally recommend this for your book club. I think there's a lot of things to unpack. I was surprised. I was entertained. I highly recommend it. It is Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg.
