A free copy of this book was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Twitter Girl is the story of Cassidy Shea who is fired from her job in network news for a controversial tweet and is then hired onto the team of presidential hopeful Will Becker to help take down his rivals via social media. Along the way Cassidy begins to hope for a future with Will as they travel on the campaign trail.
I was looking forward to reading this book, but I didn't understand or enjoy the style of writing or characters along the way. Cassidy, our heroine, is a journalist, although she doesn't spend a lot of time in this story investigating or even behaving like someone who's ever worked in an actual workplace before. I think the author was trying so hard to make her the-best-woman-in-romance-ever that he forgot to make her vaguely realistic. She is basically the male ideal - she is gorgeous but doesn't know it, she eats whatever she wants but never gets fat, she plays poker with the boys and drink beer, she has an equally gorgeous best friend and the two of them spend a ridiculous amount in the time in the book talking about how gorgeous each other's boobs and legs are. She is pretty much Gillian Flynn's much maligned 'cool girl'. In addition to all these things, Cassidy is single, which we know because she is described as "35 and never married" several times in the book, including on one occasion in a news article written about her, which just confused me. Her job also never seems like it really takes off. There are a few tweets in the story but most of them are talking about her romances or a potshots at the other presidential candidates. And after each one, there's a man standing nearby to tell Cassidy "great job" or "you're so funny", even if we don't see that. It all feels incredibly self-congratulatory to read... which in all fairness is kind of what I imagine American politics to be like anyway, but doesn't make for good reading.
In addition to this, most of the story is just Cassidy talking about all the guys on the Senator's campaign who are hot and imagining them naked or kissing them or going on dates with them. Which would be fine, except that when it comes to Will Becker, her main love interest, nothing much actually happens. We never really see him and so he never really appears as a credible romantic partner for Cassidy.
The mystery part of the story is nice and I did enjoy that part of the story when we got to it. I also liked that Tatano included a character who is disabled, in Cassidy's brother Sam, who isn't just there to be inspirational but actually is a fully disabled character, although like his sister he is a bit too good to be true.
All in all though, the problems with the two-dimensional characters (or one-dimensional in the case of the men) and the self-congratulatory tone of the writing didn't really work for me and I struggled to get through the whole book. 2 stars.