Book Review: Hayley Phelan – Like Me

 

(The Audio version of this review will appear on the Book Review Podcast at the start of  April 2022. Available from all of the usual places)

Strengths:

It was interesting straight away to notice that the book contained a adult warning right from the cuff of this book straight away.

The book itself focus around a aspiring model called Mickey who gets lost in the world of social, primarily Instagram and becomes more and obessed with a model on instagram called Gemma Anton.

So far, it did feel like a bit like Single White Female except it goes much darker when Mickey bumps into Gemma at a nightclub and everything gets darker and darker.

The book at its best for me works when it talks about Social obession and the danger of social media in particular of Instagram with the obession Mickey gets with comments, shares and likes on social media and over the next two hundred pages builds up into a quite horrific climax with all kinds of dark topics cropping – sexual abuse, drug abuse, eating disorders and even racism.

Weaknesses:

The ending of this book made me think off Bethany Clift’s Last one at the party which Reading in Bed my book review Podcast reviewed last month where I loved the ending where it left to think to yourselves whether the characters at the end lived or did not.

Despite the fact, I felt some of the darker topics in this book did seem somewhat causally covered you could say, the last part of the book, the eplilogue seemed not needed atall and seemed to egg the pudding if you know what I mean and should have being left out to encourage the reader to think for themselves what exactly happened.

However if they had left this out, it would have made this a novella rather than a short novel and that showed the fault in this book that there was a lack of focus in the book, and I think the bit about Mickey when she started to think Gemma had being murdered came into the book way too late and left the book very, very misbalanced.

6/10