Follow Me

Follow Me- Kathleen Barber
Gallery Books
Release Date: February 25, 2020

Rating:
📚📚📚

Synopsis: Audrey Miller has an enviable new job at the Smithsonian, a body by reformer Pilates, an apartment door with a broken lock, and hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers to bear witness to it all. Having just moved to Washington, DC, Audrey busies herself impressing her new boss, interacting with her online fan base, and staving off a creepy upstairs neighbor with the help of the only two people she knows in town: an ex-boyfriend she can’t stay away from and a sorority sister with a high-powered job and a mysterious past.

But Audrey’s faulty door may be the least of her security concerns. Unbeknownst to her, her move has brought her within striking distance of someone who’s obsessively followed her social media presence for years—from her first WordPress blog to her most recent Instagram Story. No longer content to simply follow her carefully curated life from a distance, he consults the dark web for advice on how to make Audrey his and his alone. In his quest to win her heart, nothing is off-limits—and nothing is private.

____________________________________________________________________

Audrey Miller is a popular person with a bouncy personality who only shows others a carefully curated version of her life and her emotions- both in person and online.  She's become a successful Instagram influencer with over a million followers, which has nabbed for her a coveted job as a social media manager at a Washington D.C. museum.  Things might look perfect, but behind the scenes Audrey is dealing with some dark issues.  The apartment she rented sight-unseen is a basement apartment with a window into an alley and a creeper with a spare key on the first floor.  The only people she knows are her former roommate from college and an ex-boyfriend.  While some co-workers are great, others are more than pushing the boundaries set by HR.  And moving to D.C. has put her into the range of someone who's been obsessively following her online for years- and is no longer content with following her only online.

Follow Me brings up all kinds of questions for the modern age, and does a great job of arguing both sides of every issue.  It's up to the reader to decide if Audrey is a self-obsessed narcissist who only feels alive when over-sharing with strangers, or a people-person who hates to be alone and sees social media as a way of connecting to others and never truly being by herself.  Is she "asking for it" by sharing so much?  Has she erased all expectations of privacy in her life? To me any argument that starts with "asked for it" has already lost, but what's interesting (and really creepy) in Follow Me is seeing things not only from Audrey's point of view, but also that of her stalker.  Obviously, I don't agree with him in any way, but it makes you wonder: how many people out there think like that?  Probably more than we'd like to imagine.

Barber uses an interesting mix of characters and personalities to tell this story and I have to give her points because I didn't see the end coming until pretty close to the end.  It's a bit of a shocker, and leaves the reader with more questions.  Mostly: is any person capable of any action given the right (or wrong) set of circumstances? Is it our upbringing, childhood bullying, or something specific to each individual that guides our choices- both for good and for bad?

Follow Me has moments of serious intenseness, periods where it drags, and everything in the middle.  Not a book I can see myself rereading, but I'm glad I read it for the thought-provoking arguments it raises. I definitely don't recommend reading this one alone at night! 

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review