TELL YOUR FRIENDS

A former child influencer contends with an obsessive and dangerous fan.

Crystal Shaw has spent pretty much her entire life on camera, a performer in her British family’s wildly successful vlog, At Home With the Shaws. Raised on a secluded island with younger twin siblings, she’s part of the brand her parents have built around “slow, clean living” as they turned intimate family moments into curated content. For Crystal, this upbringing has been suffocating; she feels less like a member of a family and more like “a character in [their] brand’s story.” Desperate for independence, she convinces her parents to let her attend Cradlewell University in London, which they agree to as long as she continues to churn out content. Besides experiencing life on her own terms, Crystal arrives with a more urgent goal: to dismantle her family’s carefully crafted image and free herself—and her siblings—from the shackles of their media-driven lives. At school, Crystal meets fellow journalism student Alyssa Hayes, and they quickly become close friends. However, Alyssa has a secret: She’s a longtime superfan of the Shaws, having followed their channel obsessively for years. Alyssa has frequently fantasized about belonging to the seemingly perfect Shaw family. Now, with Crystal threatening to expose its flaws, she becomes increasingly determined to preserve the illusion, with deadly consequences. The novel’s plot is compelling and consistently engaging, though some twists concerning the family’s past feel predictable and underdeveloped. Alyssa occasionally shows flashes of being an intriguing antagonist, yet is hampered by flat motivations that may leave readers unsatisfied. The book truly shines in its exploration of fraught family dynamics, especially between Crystal and her mother, Marjorie, offering a thought-provoking look at the ethics of child-centered content creation.

A suspenseful novel that falls short of its full potential.