The story centers on a holier than thou guru and the house of cards that social media and online celebrities/influencers appear to often live in. We often place unrealistic expectations on "influencers", expect them to be perfect, and far too many people delight in tearing them down when it turns out they weren't as perfect as they were pretending to be. The character development was great — Sometimes we see a different side of people when they’re pushed to, or beyond, their limits.

It's a timely story - a morality tale for the Instagram generation - and all the more compelling for it. With everything at stake, what will happen and what will become of Samantha and whose account is the truth or is there more than one truth? Louise says, ‘I have been inside this community for the best part of two decades, but there were things I noted during the pandemic that got me thinking.If all that cultural appropriation and saccharine spirituality puts your teeth on edge, join the club! To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. We need to ask ourselves why it is that certain people keep being given a platform, only for them to be revealed as frauds, criminals, or abusers. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Idol was dark, deceptive, and entirely engaging — Samantha Miller has built an empire as an influencer.

Idol asks us to confront whether we really remember the past accurately—and what happens if we aren’t the person we remember being? Louise's first novel for adults, Almost Love, was published in 2018, followed shortly by The Surface Breaks, her feminist re-imagining of The Little Mermaid. As her public profile disintegrates, with reporters contacting old friends and flames for dirt, Sam travels back to her hometown to confront Lisa and attempt to keep her life on the rails. We meet Sam in the run-up to the release of her fourth book Chaste (“Sex is sacred and we have to honour it as the force that it is. The only things that stay murky are the parts about the MC's trauma and mental illness, which obviously really took from her character development.Samantha is shallow, selfish and spiteful and her friend, Lucy, doesn't have any personality to speak of. And her career is booming: she’s just hit three million followers, her new book Chaste has gone straight to the top of the bestseller lists and she’s appearing at sell-out events. I ditched it 3/4 of the way through to read the last 2 chapters and don’t feel like I missed anything. Her first novel, Only Ever Yours, was released in 2014 and won the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, the Eilís Dillon Award for a First Book and the Bookseller’s inaugural YA Book Prize.