This was such an enjoyable and messy read. Flew through it. Toxic female friendships, online celebrity, #MeToo, the urge to self-mythologise online, influencer culture, cancel culture, obsession. I know this might sound like so much to cram in but O'Neill did it in such a good n easy n compelling way. Some of this was genuinely hard to read, whether due to the content or the actual visceral cringe I felt.

This was my first book by the author and I'll definitely be picking more up.

Big thanks to NetGalley, Random House UK, and the author for the e-ARC.
Available to buy 12/5/22.

CW: SA, eating disorder, emotional abuse

Idol was the first book I read this year, and I've been waiting impatiently for it's release date of 5th May to finally talk about it. It's everything you expect from Louise O'Neill; it's gripping and unflinching, and she returns once again to family themes of assault, abuse, an unreliable narrator and shifting perspectives.

Samantha is an author and social media influencer, with devoted fans who hang on her every word and live their lives how she tells them to, and they think, by her example. However, when an article she writes about an empowering sexual experience with a female friend goes viral, it's for the wrong reason: her old best friend is claiming that this "experience" was not consensual, and Samantha's world is thrown into chaos as she tries to reason with her old friend to get her to take back this claim. This is a fresh direction from O'Neill and this kind of story in that it's 1. from the point of view of the alleged perpetrator 2. who was once a victim of sexual assault herself and 3. it is about woman on woman assault.

O'Neill doesn't just attack influencer culture, she sets her sights primarily on how this is used as an insidious front of faux spirituality, preying on young people, co-opting and discarding different identities for profit. This is especially interesting in how wellness culture was sustained during and tries to rebuild in the wake of the pandemic, during which Sam is all to aware others in her industry got very wrong.

If anything, my only note is that it was doing too much with the ending and there wasn't a need for quite so many twists and turns. The ending surprised me but felt right, but it also needed more room so that it could land with the reader. However, I finished this in the middle of the night because I couldn't put it down, so I'll let you decide for yourself if I'm right on that, or if I sped through it far too fast!

Wow! This was fast paced and intriguing from start to finish, and raised really interesting and complex issues around consent, social media and cancellation culture.

Sam is a self made wellness mogul. After battling addiction and making bad mistakes in her youth, she has turned her life around to help promote other women. She has written books and had movies released, and tours the world helping 'her girls' to become the best she can be. She is at the top of her game, idolised by millions across the globe and an example to many.

However, her world is shook following an email to her manager and it all starts to unwind.

Sam is an unreliable narrator - she has battled addiction and so from the start you are aware that her view of these years may be skewed. But it goes further than this. How accurate are our memories? Are they a construct we raise to protect ourselves from the truth? Can two peoples memories of the same event really be so different, and does that mean someone is lying or do we genuinely remember things differently? Do we lie to ourselves on purpose, or does our mind play tricks on us as a survival instinct? How does the trauma of memories, realised or not, affect how we live our lives?

Many of the issues throughout the book centre on the issue of consent. In the wake of the #metoo movement, Sam is pushing hard for all women to be believed when they make allegations of sexual assault. But what does this mean for her - both as a victim and an alleged perpetrator? Does the #metoo movement go far enough? And how does trial by social media affect the possibility of a fair trial in law?

Sam has built her whole world up around social media - it is crucial to her success. But when the tables are turned, will social media be crucial to her downfall? How safe is a business built up on the idoltry of millions of strangers, and is it possible for a person to keep up that facade? After all, we're all human - what happens to your idol when they show that human side to themselves? Do they remain an idol???

I couldn't put this book down. The twist at the end wasn't so much a twist, as hurtling towards an inevitability that I felt the characters should also have seen coming, but I enjoyed that element of it too as it felt like real life. The book raised more questions to me than it answered - essential for making me question the status quo. Definitely a must read.

This was a great read! It did take a while to get into it but there were plot twists throughout that kept you guessing. I wasn’t sure about the main character of the book, and found myself swinging wildly between loving and hating them! Would read again.

This was an awesome story, with an original (to me) plot. An influencer gets called out in the cancel culture that she has made a living from - Samantha is an empowerment/wellness/self-care guru with an empire built on encouraging women to make a stand, speak their truth, and to value their own worth in the face of abuse and misogyny. All is going well with her new book launch bringing her back into the bestseller list and she releases an essay about a sexual encounter with her best high school friend. The friend gets in touch via email, telling her that the recollection she has of the incident is very different and, most importantly, that it was not consensual. Cue Samantha's world imploding. She goes home to try and rescue her reputation, and that is where the story really comes into its own.
There are so many interesting set-ups throughout the book and Louise O'Neill deftly shows that people that are not one-dimensional, not either simply good or bad. Samantha is not a likeable character, but she is dealing with a lot of heavy trauma that left me feeling sympathy for her and gave context to her actions even as she became more and more grotesque in her plight to keep hold of her image. Nearly all of the characters have done varying degrees of history re-writing, either consciously or not, and this means that all the contributors are unreliable...just like in most real situations of big emotion. Even after finishing it I'm not sure what really happened, or if it even really matters -if people truly believe their memories then that becomes their truth and the actual truth is almost irrelevant to the impact the event has had on them.
This is a really amazing exploration of the human mind and the constructs we build for ourselves to help us understand who we are, or shape who we want to be. It's also an amazing thriller that will keep you gripped. The writing is first class.

Samantha Miller has it all - ambition, fame, money and 'her girls' - adoring fans that hang onto every word she says. Life is good for Sam, and her new book is set to rock the charts until an email from an old friend brings it all crashing down. Sam's childhood best friend is claiming a sexual experience between the two of them, that Sam wrote about in an article, wasn't consensual and now Sam's whole career is teetering on the brink. There's nothing worse than being cancelled, and Sam is determined to not let it happen.

Another fantastic book from Louise O'Neill - this had everything I wanted in a book looking at celebrity and cancel culture that I haven't received in other books and I loved how Sam's character was built up as this wellness influencer (think Brené Brown meets Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop), but then over the chapters all the cracks and ugliness in her perfect exterior started to shine through.

This author is just a master at creating these amazingly complex, flawed human beings and you hate them but relate to them all at the same time for the perfectly imperfect way they swan through life. I think so much can be written about the world of influencers - particularly a type of influencer (rich, white women) who don't really know the meaning of struggle taking advantage of the needs and issues of other women who are so desperate for a calm face to guide them through it all. There were some great moments in this when we see how Sam's following is mostly white young women (but that's not her fault) and she receives criticism from BIPOC influencers in the same sphere for her cultural appropriation when it comes to the type of practices she preaches which seem to be a mixture of different faiths and organisations.

Everything in Sam's hometown was like watching a car crash and Sam just kept digging that hole deeper, and deeper for herself. While she was 40 years old, it was obvious that she had never let go of some things from her childhood (namely not being chosen as 'the one' by the boy she liked). The look at the intoxicating, obsessive way female friendships can be especially at a young age when emotions and hormones are so out of control was done really well. And how we can see Sam exercise her control once more over Lisa when she comes back into town and uses her more domineering personality to wear the other woman (who is mentally & spiritually fragile) down.

There were lots of satisfying moments in this book but the ending was the cherry on the cake, and I feel like I let out a sigh of relief when everything came crashing down once again.

This book is a fantastic take on truth and memory, as well as how one can warp the truth/memory for their own gain. It's also a fantastic gaze at the danger of influencer culture to such an extreme and how it seems to be so easy for young women to fall under the spell of others who might just being using their trauma for their own gain.

I initially wasn’t sure about this book, it took me a little to get into it and it seemed slow but the ending was spot on and I have found myself having enjoyed it. My views of Sam fluctuated throughout the book between feeling sorry for her and finding her extremely unlikable. And the little plot twists throughout renewed my desire to find out what happened at the end. A light read, well written and good plot construction. This is probably a 3.5 and would have been higher if it has captured me a bit quicker.

Thank you for NetGalley for providing me with this book for review.
Oh my, oh my, what a read, a rollercoaster of a plot, I couldn't put it down.

I was intrigued by this book from the moment I saw it and I was not wrong. This book is brilliant. Totally different to what I am used to reading and I could not put it down. It was a book where I was snatching 5 mins here and there to find out what was going on in the story, its a real page turner.
This book highlights the impact of social media today and that things aren't always what they seem to be. This shows how persona's online can be cultivated and people think they know the real person but do you ever really know someone?
This is a book about female relationships and the books goes back in time to when Samantha had a birthday party for Lisa's 18th birthday and the fall out from that night. The book goes from then to present day and shows how this night affects the characters, even now.
Thank you to Louise O'Neill, Netgalley and Random House for the opportunity to read this book as an eArc

Most of us have some input into social media, but there are those who as influencers, have millions of fans and like Samantha Miller, have amassed a fortune.
In the twenty two years since she left her home town, Samantha has completely reinvented herself. She is an international media star. She runs a wellness empire (Shakti) with millions of followers; young women hanging on her every word and following her advice on how to live their best lives. However, a piece she publishes in the run up to a new book launch concerning an experience she had over twenty years ago, has her former best friend e-mailing Sam’s manager, with a very different version.
As the story progresses, back and forth between present day and Samantha’s teenage years, a picture emerges of a spoilt rich wild child who has everything and her not so rich friend who so wants to emulate her. At first I felt sorry for Samantha; misunderstood by her parents and having the love of her life, Josh stolen by her best friend Lisa. She left home and built her own successful business, and now finds herself at Lisa’s mercy. But then, when she returns home intending to see Lisa and get her to retract her statement, a very different character emerges. A manipulator who is going to make sure things work out the way she wants them to, no matter what. It’s clear that Samantha has a much darker side to her character and maybe her truth is a little flawed.
I found the book impossible to put down, wondering how all this would end. It’s a dark, raw thought provoking read, one which as it draws to its conclusion, indicates that revenge (which comes from a totally unexpected source) is indeed a dish best served cold.
My thanks to Netgalley, Louise O’Neill and Random House for an ARC of Idol in exchange for an honest review.

Sam see's herself as a cash cow in the Spirituality industry. As an author of a best selling book millions of women idolise her, which resulted in her having a huge presence on social media and a massive following. There is no doubt that Sam is media candy, successful, famous and walks amongst the A-listers. However her carefully crafted image starts to faulter when a letter arrives from her former best friend Lisa, claiming the essay Sam wrote about an amazing sexual awakening she had with her when they were young, was not how she recalled it, giving rise to whether the act was consensual or not. Being viciously trolled, losing thousands of followers a day and with the fear of being cancelled, Sam desperately reaches out to Lisa to try and prove her innocence and regain control over her life.

The story starts off depicting Sam's wanton lifestyle, however it quickly becomes clear that there are sinister notes to her personally. The book constantly debate's just who is the liar and who is responsible for the attack on Sam's personal empire. I did find that quite a lot of the narrative and actions of the characters were repetitive which made for a slow read. I get that the characters were impacted by mental health issues but many times I wished that the characters would just take decisive action and get on with it instead of the constant back and forth arguing. Overall this book had an interesting plot,

Wow this is a real page turner I could not stop reading, This is about a woman called Samantha Miller who has everything and is a very successful wellness guru and has millions of followers on social media who read her books and go to her motivational speeches. Then she writes a essay about her best friend Lisa and what happened one night when they were teenagers. The only problem is Lisa remembers it differently and states she was sexually assaulted that night.
Compelling and shows the danger of social media and how your memories can play tricks on you.
Highly recommended and thanks to NetGalley and Transworld Publishers Ltd for a advanced copy.

This is my first read from Louise O’Neill and I’m not sure whether it was the subject matter, the characters or the writing but something wasn’t quite right for me.

Firstly, the plot.. I think I’ve realised I just hate reading about faux social media stars to be honest. If find the characters to always be egotistical and dull so in hindsight, this perhaps wasn’t the storyline for me to begin with.

Secondly, the characters. Wow, I hated Sam and everything she stood for, I also didn’t particularly like Josh or Lisa either to be honest but Sam was off the chart. She was self absorbed and completely false and at the half way point i realised I genuinely did not care what happened in the rest of the book.

Finally, the writing. It wasn’t bad but it also wasn’t great. It was a bit meandering and I get that that’s a style and quite popular but it wasn’t really for me.

Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a bad book, but it fell flat from the expectations I’d got from all the glowing reviews. It was a 2.5 star for me.

Idol by Louise O'Neill

4 STARS

A thought-provoking read in the #MeToo era. This is a dark, compelling and claustrophobic story with an unreliable narrator. I can't say that any of the characters are particularly likable but in a story such as this, I don't think they necessarily need to be.

The role of social media, cancel culture, the wellness and guru movement alongside white women as saviours are also all covered. A book that will make you question your own moral stance.

Once again Louise O'Neill captures the zeitgeist in a novel with a commentary on the dangers of social media and cancel culture. Her main character in Idol is Samantha Miller who has built up millions of young women followers on social media with the dictum of always telling the truth. Her latest book, an essay telling her 'personal truth', flies off the shelves. But everyone has their own version of the truth and her old female best friend, Lisa, disputes Sam's version of a sexual assault. When Sam is in danger of being cast out and losing all her followers she resorts to desperate means, all the while believing her story is the true one.

Idol is very readable and of the moment. Who is really telling the truth? Will Sam get the comeuppance she may, or may not, deserve? It proves that we all remember events differently and maybe we shouldn't rush to publicise 'our truth'.

Ms. O'Neill's fans will love Idol. Many thanks to Bantam Press/Random House UK/Transworld and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Samantha Miller, a wellness guru on Instagram, encourages her fans to be authentic and speak their truth. Her career is flying: she’s hit three million followers, her new book has hit the bestseller list and her speaking events quickly sell out. When she decides to tell her truth, she writes an essay about her female best friend, Lisa, and the night they spent together as teenagers. The essay goes viral, but Lisa gets in touch to let Samantha know that she doesn’t remember it the same way. Rather than being a sexual awakening for Lisa, it was a night of sexual assault. Whose memory is correct?

Hot on the #MeToo movement, Idol by Louise O’Neill is a gripping page turner featuring the dark theme of sexual assault. It’s hard to tell at first whether our protagonist, Samantha, is an unreliable narrator, or in fact if any of the other characters are telling the truth. With this comes discussion on whether our memories can change so much over time that two people can remember one incident completely differently.

Compelling and enthralling, Idol is a commentary on social media, cancel culture and the unreliability of memory. I couldn’t read it fast enough!

“Was this what it meant to be an adult, everyone reframing their childhood experiences to paint themselves as the victim?”

Samantha Miller is a social media darling. More than an influencer, she is an icon with a best-selling book who speaks at sold out events. She is an oracle telling her millions of “girls” what to wear, how to live, and how to honour their ‘truth’. In the spirit of honouring her ‘truth’ she has just published a no-holds barred essay on her first sexual experience, with her schoolfriend Lisa – something she has never discussed with anyone before. But what if things aren’t quite how she remembers them? And what if the people from her past don’t want to be dragged into the limelight…?

***

On the one hand, Idol is just as readable as everything Louise O’Neill has done. It is pacy and compelling, rattling along gathering momentum as it goes and you’ll easily get swept up and finish it in a few sittings. It is interesting to draw attention to the difference between the presentation of influencers and who they actually are, and to see a “trail by social media” from the perspective of the person turned upon. On the other hand, this rings shallower than her earlier work – Samantha is sometimes more caricature than convincing, and she is by far the best drawn character in the book. Lisa – the best-friend/foil – remains completely 2D to the end, and the ending is a bit sudden. I have read every Louise O’Neill book, and while Idol is set in a different time and place there is also a sameness to the internal lives of all her characters that is really starting to grate on me. Just once it would be nice not to be trapped in the mindset of a woman obsessed with skeletal thinness, but this is the only worldview O’Neill allows. There’s more than one way of living in the world, and this book would be better if that was represented. I am getting pretty fatigued with detailed descriptions of the visibility of hip bones and scenes of the lead character binging and purging – Only Ever Yours needed them, this did not. Still worth a read, I still enjoyed it, but this author’s work is starting to come with caveats for me.

Samantha Miller is a wellness guru with three million followers on Instagram and a multi million dollar brand she built all by herself. When she writes an essay about a sexual encounter she had when she was a teenager the other person, her best friend, Lisa, claims it was non-consensual. Everything Samatha has worked for is about to be taken from her.
This book is incredible. Louise O Neill writes such an intriguing story with characters so unlikeable it's unbelievable.
She captured so well the nostalgic feeling of growing up in the nineties and how some friendships can be so toxic during such a turbulent time in one's life.
Everyone needs to read this book.

I will always read a book by Louise O'Neill. She's one of those authors whose books I always look forward to, even if they aren't all necessarily 5 star reads, they tend to always say something interesting, and they will always be written from a feminist perspective.

Idol is definitely Louise O'Neill to a T - very dark, with complicated characters who you aren't sure if you're meant to root for. Sam Miller, the protagonist (?) of Idol is an online "wellness" influencer - think Goop served up with an extra dosage of snake oil. Her life is pretty perfect with her millions of followers, new best selling book - until an accusation from an old friend threatens everything.

Idol was such a compelling read, I really enjoyed it but it also made my skin crawl (in a good way)!

Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

I’ve enjoyed other books by this author and was delighted to be approved for this one. I like how she delves into sensitive subjects that are not only thought provoking but she gives you a different spin on a topic. This one focuses very much on current issues with social media, influencers and cancel culture along with other important themes. I found these topics to be very well written. Told from Sam’s perspective but in the form of a dual timeline with flashbacks to her childhood in the 90’s. Its a well paced page turner that keeps you reading to find out what’s coming. I wasn’t overly surprised at how it developed as you can see where it’s going but I still enjoyed the process of getting there. I didn’t find any of the characters overly endearing and at different times I found it hard to like anything about them. I was a little disappointed at how it ended as I felt I needed a bit more but overall I enjoyed it.

3.5/5 🌟🌟🌟/🌟

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK for the opportunity to read and review this ARC that’s due for release on the 12th of May.