Followers

When 16-year-old Lily Rhode is arrested after a dating disaster, her mug shot goes viral. Lily is the niece of Whitney Paley, a Hollywood housewife and star of the reality show The Platinum Triangle, a soap-opera-style series revolving around several glamorous families in Los Angeles. Invited to stay with her high-profile relatives after her mother leaves her alone, Lily is sucked into the high-pitched drama of Whitney, her movie-star husband, Patrick, and their daughter, Hailey.

Hailey and the other reality-star offspring have lived their entire lives on camera. Excess and deception are their way of life, and online attention is their lifeblood. Juggling her newfound fame and the manoeuvrings around her, Lily soon discovers she is being manipulated. Unsavoury rumours are swirling about super-dad Patrick, and Lily’s new family is using her to make them more sympathetic to viewers. In front of the camera, Hailey is a sweet and caring cousin to Cinderella-like Lily, but, behind the scenes, Hailey is out to destroy her, especially when Lily catches the attention of Hailey’s romantic interest, Joel Strom.

But Lily has smarts of her own, and she won’t be a pushover for the Platinum Triangle teens or their parents. And as the storylines get dramatic, online followers are out for blood.

As he did with his first novel, When Everything Feels Like the Movies, ( http://www.umanitoba.ca/outreach/cm/vol21/no1/wheneverythingfeelslikethe... ) Raziel Reid captures character voices with a finely tuned ear and poignant authenticity. Flitting from one point of view to another, the narrative pieces itself together in fragments, each section identified by a character username and accompanied by a string of follower comments and emojis. The drama makes for compulsive reading despite – or probably because of – its gossipy, scandalous tone. Reading it feels like being sucked into a reality TV show in spite of yourself, even as the overdramatic interactions make a reader feel like a voyeur. The large and sometimes confusing cast of characters is listed at the beginning of the novel which helps provide clarity.

The teens, brought up online and on camera, are especially aware of the schism between reality and the manufactured storyline. “Bro, it doesn’t matter what’s real,” Idris says. He leans in and whispers in Fortune’s ear. “It only matters what people think is real” (p. 29). Even those who seem to have control over their world are aware of its effects. Hailey, with a million followers, sees her limitations. “People say that you can manipulate your image on social media but really you can only feed your image,” Hailey says. “At least once it’s been established, once people think they have you figured out. You’re trapped by their idea of who you are, and if you’re not careful…you become it” (p. 191).

Followers, while it reads like a titillating Hollywood gossip magazine, makes a profound comment on the shallowness and fakery not only of reality shows, but also of social media. The characters occasionally allow glimpses of honest emotion, but layers of pretense keep them hidden. All action is done in a swarm of comments from followers, from adulation to hate speech. As Lily steps into the online world with her own account, she does so to the snarling background noise of hatred.

Raziel Reid’s controversial first novel, When Everything Feels Like the Movies, won the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for children’s literature and was criticized for its graphic imagery. In Followers, Reid again writes with shocking candor and vulgar language about sexuality and self-indulgent, self-destructive behaviour. While the writing is not for the faint of heart, it creates an authenticity of voice that breaks conventional boundaries. The vulgarity in the writing fits the hedonism of the extravagantly wealthy, image-conscious context of the book and with some of the excesses of social media. Though young readers may not be on a reality show, judgement from online sources creates a subtext that can be overly adoring or cruelly negative. Followers offers a satirical comment on the falseness of media images and the dehumanizing effects of our continued fascination and participation with them.

The language and mature subject matter may make the book suitable more for older teens, but the celebrity gossip style will make Followers a hot item on school library shelves or on ebook downloads.