Who you think I am by Camille Laurens.
In a vertiginous play of mirrors between fantasy and virtual reality, Camille Laurens relates the dangerous liaisons of a woman who refuses to give up on desire.
This is the story of Claire Millecam, a 48 year-old teacher and divorcee, who creates a fake social media profile to try to keep tabs on Jo, her occasional, elusive, and inconstant lover. Under the false identity of Claire Antunes, a young and beautiful 24 year-old, she starts a correspondence with Chris--pseudonym KissChris--which soon turns into an Internet love affair.
A very good read with good characters. I liked the story. Bit slow but I managed to read it. 4*. Netgalley and other press.

I tried very, very hard to like and get through this book but it's an odd read. I really wanted to like this because the premise and the execution was interesting, but I just didn't care for the writing.

When I read the blurb for this book I got excited. I thought it sounded right up my alley.
*image ragey gif here that won't post for me*

It's soooo bad. Bad enough that I wanted to go back over all the years of one starring books and raise some of their scores because this was honestly that bad.

Before you get your panties all in a wad and your trolling fingers ready....I'll give you some examples of the writing.

You can imagine all sorts of things, you do imagine all sorts of things, you look at his new friends' profiles-both male and female-looking for a revelation in someone's posts; you decipher the tiniest comment, you keep cutting from one wall to another, you play back the songs he's listened to, read meaning into the lyrics, learn about what he likes, view his photos and videos, keep an eye on his geo-location, the events he's going to, you navigate like a submarine though an ocean of faces and words.

I swear that's one sentence!!

Here's another one.
And you can go ahead and do what the others did, deducing that I had God knows what sort of fusional relationship with my mother, an inability to break away, a castration complex and everything else.

Now if you read my reviews..you know that I AM NOT A WRITER..I use run on sentences, sentence fragments and I make up words...but I don't profess to be an author. Nooooo hell nooo on this crud. DNF and I have no shame!

Booksource: Netgalley in exchange for review.

2 Stars.

“Who You Think I Am” by Camille Laurens was confusing as all get out. After reading it, I have no idea who the main character, Claire Millecam a/k/a Claire Antunes, purported to be.

Formulating coherent thoughts about a book that was extremely hard to get into (and took me forever to do so because of it) and whose ending made no sense and also had me re-reading it, causing me to scratch my head and rub my eyes, has made me wonder if I read a different book than those who gave it 4 and/or 5 star reviews. For the first-time ever, I honestly don’t know what to say though I will do my best.

After a confusing start, the book does in fact take off quickly. I believe it starts with the main character, Claire Millecam narrating: she speaks in long run on sentences, describing her obsession with her boyfriend Joe, who is a narcissist. He, of course, only cares for himself and breaks things off. Thereafter, Claire decides she wants to spy on Joe on Facebook. Knowing he won’t friend her, she creates a fake profile, that of Claire Antunes, using another much younger woman’s photo and friends his roommate Chris “Kiss Chris.” An online relationship between the two ensues.

Thereafter, things get sketchy. Confusing. What we are told and what is true is unclear. Who Claire is speaking to, describing these actions to is unclear; what happens next; who then takes over as the narrator is confusing. What we know and what we are told could perhaps be left to our interpretation of the story. I am not quite sure.

The book itself was short, and for this I was glad. After the messy beginning, it went quickly and for that I was also grateful. Unfortunately, proofreading errors also made this novel tough to follow. Several people gave it glowing reviews, thus I guess I must be missing something or perhaps I just missed the point.

Thank you to NetGalley, Other Press and Camille Laurens for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Published on NetGalley, Goodreads and Amazon on 3/30/17.

This book was TREMENDOUS!!!!! I thought it was completely addictive, and in the world we live in now that social media is so huge and has taken over our lives, sometimes to the point we don't know who we really are at points, this one really connected with me. I once had an idea of doing a fake internet profile to talk to someone, not for the same reasons as Claire, but moreso to be over the line nosey...and this book made me glad I didn't. Well, more glad. I absolutely loved this novel and felt it was so smart and relevant.

Great read! Looking forward to reading more by this author!

Yes, that’s it, I’m no longer operational, I’ve blown a fuse, if you like, or blown a gasket, tripped a switch, and whee! I’ve spun out of control…”

Whoa, there are times when readers are mislead by interesting book cover art. Not so here! I started reading the first few pages annoyed at the mad ravings, the sentences that went on and on, manic even-but it fits and after that… gorgeous literary fiction! There is anger, passion, some mad musings and if there is a disorder for highlighting too much then I now have it. Maybe it’s because I am 41 that I related to the anger women feel in double standards, the hypocrisy of it all! Something happens when you are dismissed, overlooked, made to feel like an old cow set out to pasture. Yes, we all know the argument- you can only be made to feel that way if you allow it. Pfft!

We follow Claire Millecam as she creates a fake identity with a social media profile. Here she becomes young, beautiful Claire Attunes, not to win the affections of Chris but initially to spy on her fickle lover Joe through Chris’s social media page. Claire tangles the web she weaved, now the spider sits in her web and Chris jumps right in but who is the real victim? Becoming young, she is now worthy of wooing, she is fascinating, fresh and new! It isn’t long before Claire is seduced by the connection she and Chris have made. Chris (whom she admits she was jealous of) as Joe’s friend has usurped her place! He told her, unseen over the phone- “Go Die” loaded with spitting cruelty. “People throw themselves out of windows for less than that, don’t they? Plenty here would. They’ve been bashed around by so many words they start to wobble. Go die. Go Die. Other people’s words follow them around like hostile ghosts.” She is falling in love, but can it be love when she isn’t who she says she is? There is a violence in fiction, and the lies turn on her leading to fatal consequences or is it all deception? The reader is the fly, truth be told, because we are played with throughout! Just when we’ve dug our feet in and are on solid ground, the author erases everything, and the reader is left on thin air, just as Claire’s love is thin air.

I understand I am rambling, but I devoured this in two nights! Claire argues with us and herself in the telling, she loses the plot, there is a comfort in insanity, an anchor in believing the horrible things that passed were done in the name of love. We deceive ourselves so dreadfully to live with what befalls us in the name of love. It’s not just her head we climb into. Joe’s cold dismissive nature of women is sort of funny and delusional too. “My life- he seemed to think with one last pitying look at my apartment, my books, my face- my life wouldn’t mean much now that his was going to be so wonderful on the far side of the world. Being happy isn’t enough, you also need other people to be unhappy: it’s a recognized formula.” Is his vain attitude any worse than a woman’s clinging despair? Let it be said, there are plenty of female Joe’s in the world too. Off they go to better, shinier things and imagine you remain behind, like an unloved abandoned haunted house. Sometimes we take up that role, be if we’re smart, we shake it off and move on.

Reader, be warned, you are lied to. But to get to the gooey center of truth requires sifting through the wreckage. This is one of the most unique literally fictions I’ve read in a long time. There is nothing I love more than dredging the dark corners of the mind, getting past the ‘social mask’ we wear, be it media or not. Even through Claire’s disastrous moments I found myself laughing. It’s hard to take a man seriously when he is acting belligerent and silly. Being a woman requires crocodile skin, if you make it past your ‘expiration date’ of say, 25- you must toughen up. Claire is becoming an angry victim , she isn’t playing nice and her deception is brutal too. As a woman I can well relate to the wide eyed, harsh reality many women face as they age in comparison to men. I also can see young women (not all, some) being just as ugly about older women, not realizing they are looking at themselves in the future. Don’t be put off by some self-indulgent whining, we all have a right to it now and then, so long as you don’t get swallowed up by it. But men and women of any age can relate to being ejected by a lover from your place in their life. So long sucker! Loved this and it is not a novel I can easily explain, I feel I am failing the author because it’s original and I can’t express myself clearly. The deceptive dark side of our online persona is exposed here but it is misleading to imagine the novel purely a social media story, because it’s not. There is a lot of fat to chew on when it comes to how we manipulate others and ourselves online, how we are vulnerable hidden behind a screen and yet the reader could ignore all that and still come away with one heck of a story about love and self-deception. Read it! Just read it for yourself! “Every night I howl with terror at the thought of being a woman.” Claire has blown a fuse, no doubt about it!

Publication Date: March 28, 2o17

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