Feels weird to be reviewing a book which is about reviews. I'll start off by saying that I've never been a part of the facet of book Twitter that this is exploring, and so I'm unaware of any real-life parallels that could be made between the plot of this book and Rebecca F. Kuang's own career. Considering how personal it felt at times - and how much of a deviance it is from her usual genre - I wouldn't be surprised if she was drawing on own experience here

This is extraordinarily easy to read - I devoured it in one sitting and I'm now committed to reading Kuang's other work (which I haven't had the pleasure of until now). It has a compellingly self-centred main character whose voice feels very familiar in terms of real-life entitled authors and it triggers the morbid curiosity you get from reading a long callout thread on a public figure. The abundance of already-out-of-date pop-culture references will be problematic in the future (and the amount of unexplored Harry Potter mentions - considering the book's subject - made me a bit uncomfortable) but I feel like they make sense with the characters' ages at the time of reading.

My main issue comes with the melodramatic and supervillain-esque climax, which is completely at odds with the rest of the book. It's self-aware of that which just baffled me further because I couldn't think of what purpose it could be serving - it must be an intentional decision but it's one I struggle to understand. That with he fact that, while addictively written, it soured in my mouth after finishing it when I realised how much of the book is just descriptions of online beef. It makes me wonder how much of the same experience I could get just by scrolling Twitter (I do not want to do that).

The dysfunctional friendship/rivalry between the main character and Athena is definitely one of the strongest parts - I much preferred when the book was focusing on them and the dynamics within the publishing industry than the parts about Juniper's social media timeline, and the soft horror elements by the end were very neat and genuinely creeped me out at times.

I'm struggling to rate this but the disappointment at the ending, which was strange and wrapped up far too quickly, dragged this one down for me