This book just didn’t draw me in. Perhaps it was the age of the main character, her social media use and her relationships. I simply couldn’t identify and was not drawn in.


Thank you Netgalley for this ARC Every book I read makes life better during this difficult time.

This story follows the life of a social media-obsessed "grown up" who seems to tackle life through her social media account. It calls to mind a certain Black Mirror episode where characters become obsessed with their virtual followers and "likes" rather than their our real life relationships.
The writing is fun and quirky and certainly reads like you are following an Instagram feed - snippets of someone's day to day (without the photos, but the prose brings to life many images in the reader's mind). Modern -entertainment reading at it's finest, certainly not literary fiction.

Very funny read I enjoyed it not something I would normally read but like I said it was funny, entertaining and I got a kick out of it

"Grown Ups" is the light story of Jenny, a millennial whose devotion to social media undermines all of her real-life relationships. While the story has some bright and shiny moments, as well as some smirking wit, I just couldn't get into It. I think for the right audience, this can be a really fun story, I may just be a little outside of the targeted age range :)

Whether you enjoy or not will depend on whether you like the humor of this book or not. I found some parts to be very funny but other parts fell a little flat for me.

This book was so enlightening, it made me early consider how much time everyone spends on their phones. The character is really relatable and I found myself really rooting for her.

I really enjoyed Emma Jane Unsworth's darker short stories, so I was intrigued to read something a little lighter from this author.

This book is basically about social media obsessions, especially when people use social media in an attempt to create a "new" life after a tragedy. Jenny, the central character, is reeling after a breakup from her partner, as well as dealing with her psychic mother. Jenny starts out as very annoying, but by the end I wanted to give her a big hug.

This was a relatively light read, told through narrative, unsent email drafts, and text conversations. It's pretty quirky, but not inaccessibly so. I enjoyed it, and would recommend it to people in their mid-twenties or early thirties.

HILARIOUS!

A brilliantly subtle criticism of the modern society, one of the best contemporary fiction I have ever read! Maybe I loved this book so much because I relate myself to it on so many levels.

This hilarious, thought-provoking and very 21st century life of a social media addict gives the reader a wider perspective of what’s been going on in our lives for some time and you can be sure to find something familiar and disturbing in these pages. I loved the flawed, imperfectly amazing protagonist. Her self-awareness, neurotic behaviors and awkwardness made her so real I fell in love with her. In an overly modernized world, we are extroverts in the most introvert way and the life of Jenny was like a slap in the face.

After a harsh self-intervention, I’ve recently put to sleep all of my social media accounts and this book is the perfect embodiment of all the little obsessions we are supplied with. “Grown Ups” tells the daily life story of woman on the brink of a midlife crisis who defines herself as a liberalist and feminist yet her life is controlled by social media junk. She lives in an unrealistic bubble of self-worth which is defined by the number of likes, a life that revolves around following, followers, stalking. We experience first hand how she decomposes in her obsession of virtual appearances, lose sight of what really matters and her slow rehabilitation into the physical world, rising from her ashes.
I also have to add that I loved the author's style, narration and the way she creates witty, authentically funny dialogs.

Highlights:
* I laughed so much at Unsworth's description of London: A city of discontented idiots in expensive houses

Meh. I kept wanting to give this book more time to get good and less annoying. There was a moment when I had a glimmer of wow this book could really be good! And then it ended. I pushed through to the end and it just wasn’t for me.

This was a very frothy read and a good examination of millennial culture. Very quick and entertaining but the characters didn't resonate with me.

OMG Jenny, the main character of this book, started out being the type of person, friend, enemy, that I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid, and have unfortunately crossed paths with way too many times. This woman is so obsessed with social media that she has no time to live her real life, with real people, having real relationships. For example, her best friend sends her a couple of texts asking her if she has time to chat (and you can tell there is some urgency to her requests), but she doesn’t even bother to respond, instead spends time stalking some random influencer’s profile for hours, and gets annoyed when she texts her best friend about her flat mates and doesn’t get a response later. Wtf woman!!
Having seen the evils of social media at work and how it changes people into complete weirdos I deleted all of my own channels a few years ago and do not miss it. Reading through Jenny’s life therefore made me want to shake her all the time!
But then suddenly, without realizing how it crept up on me, I started to like her, to feel for her. She might be annoying and silly and obsessed, but she is going through some life events that she tries to handle alone and the trauma is a little too much to contain. Some of the people she surrounds herself with are awful (Art, her mum on occasion), but some are really special (Kelly, Nicolette, her mum too). And as a reader I began to relate to Jenny and her choices.
The prose is hilarious, witty, and I laughed out loud quite a few times (and cried). While I honestly didn’t like Jenny very much for about half of the book, too self-absorbed, too annoying, I couldn’t help feeling for her, and grew to actually like her by the end.
I love how the author uses emails, texts, letters, as well as regular narrative prose in the book, it creates an interesting and fun read, very contemporary, and I think a lot of people will relate to at least some of what Jenny goes through (and puts herself through). I found it quite brilliant how the author takes the reader on a real emotional ride, pulling you from loathing to sympathy, and enjoying all types of feelings along the way.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Jenny is hilarious!
This book also gave me Bridget Jones Diary vibes- and the only difference is that everything that could wrong, does go wrong for Jenny and her journey to fulfillment and self-love and appreciation is something I can relate to.
Thanks Netgalley for the eARC.

To be fair, I don’t think I was the target audience for this book. I struggled with the main character because she is unlike any 35 year olds I know, she seems more like she is in her early 20’s. Her immaturity and self-centeredness were nearly unbearable at times. I also felt the writing in the book was choppy and kind of all over the place. Overall, I just didn’t enjoy this one.

I thought this book was cute if a little lightweight. It had a lot of funny one liners. I almost feel like it would have been better as a story in a collection of short stories vs a full novel. It seemed a bit stretched for content. Very timely though!

Unsworth follows up "Animals" with an equally unflinching portrait of modern womankind in "Grown Ups", a contemporary tale of life in the social-media obsessed world of the technological age. A world where you lose sleep over accidentally liking an old post as you're trawling through the feed of an ex / a love rival / a frenemy etc. A world where everything seems to be hinge on how many likes you get from a random crowd of gawkers, as people seek validation in all the wrong places.
In the middle of this strange new world is Jenny, whose life is publicly falling apart and who appears to be in the middle of a nervous breakdown / acute mental health episode. You can see why she may be overwhelmed, having lost her baby, her boyfriend, her job, her friends and a large chunk of her dignity en route.
"Grown Ups" occupies a similar space as "Animals" - women who really push your ability to feel compassion as they self-destruct before your eyes. Comparisons have been drawn with Fleabag, but where it feels more like you laugh along with Phoebe Waller-Bridge's sharply-observed character, here it feels like Jenny is to be laughed at, an object of ridicule, as she acts as a mirror on the absurdity of modern society.
That said, when Unsworth hits the target, it's brilliant if uncomfortable reading, as Jenny's mirror aligns with yours and you are blind-sided by your own weaknesses and failings. I just wish there were more moments like this, and less where I found myself feeling the narrative was trying too hard, overwritten and bordering on farcical. A mixed bag, but worth a read.

This was an interesting book. I’m not sure how I really felt about Jenny throughout this book. Most of the time, I kept thinking that if my children are like this in their mid-thirties, I might disown them. Jenny doesn’t seem to be concerned with anyone but herself throughout a lot of this & expectant that others will cater to her. The other part of me feels sorry for her because she hasn’t received the help she needs through therapy or other methods. Overall I thought the book was well written but sometimes hard to stomach her actions.

This book spoke to me in a way that felt far too familiar. The book starts out with the protagonist, Jenny, in a cafe, taking a picture of a croissant to share on her instagram feed. Not only does the picture have to be perfect, but she agonizes over <i>just</i>the right caption for the photo. If she says this, is it trying to hard? Not enough? Too enthusiastic? The stakes feel high and yet...who <i>really</i> cares about a picture of a croissant at the end of the day?

But this moment speaks to a larger issue in Jenny's life. She is addicted to social media. To following people, and seeing who is following her back. Finding the perfect caption. Monitoring the number of likes she gets on a post per hour, and letting that somehow determine her worth.

Jenny is in her mid-30s, newly single, living with flatmates she doesn't much care for, and has a very strained relationship with her eccentric mother. In other words, she's a bit of a mess. But as the book opens, she seems pretty oblivious about it. She's absorbed into the world of social media, and her obsession with it is all-consuming. As the reader, we can see how this is negatively affecting her life, and every now and then Jenny herself acknowledges this is unhealthy - and yet she just can't seem to function any other way. It's frustrating to watch her prioritize all the wrong things, and not see how she is neglecting other relationships in her life.

It's also interesting to look at Jenny, be frustrated with her, and also catch glimpses of yourself in her. I don't think my obsession with social media is nearly as bad or all-consuming as Jenny's - but social media has certainly changed the way I view and interact with the world. At one point Jenny is talking about a social media personality that she follows, and is wondering if that person is still with their significant other. She talks about taking a deep dive into past instagram posts of the person in question, as well as their potential boyfriend's instagram, just to find out if they're still together. Even though these are people she doesn't know, and their relationship status has no real bearing on her own life.

And I have totally, 100% done that same thing.

That's the thing - there are moments in this book where things feel very over the top - and I think that's intentional - but it hits close enough to home to remind me what a truly unhealthy thing social media can be. The way we judge ourselves by how others view us on instagram, and even how we view and compare ourselves to the glamorous lives of others (as carefully curated and depicted on social media). At the end of the day, it's not as over the top as it seems. It's a wake up call to be present in your own life.

Of course, there's more going on in this book than Jenny's obsession with instagram. Her social media crutch is a symptom of large issues going on in her life. Larger hurts that she hasn't been willing to face head-on, choosing instead to bury herself in the lives and likes of others. When she finally does have to face the things in her life that caused her to disconnect from living it fully, it's great to see her come to life in a new way. And where she finds herself at the end of the book feels both realistic and earned.

This book is likely for a very select audience. I thought that I'd love it, with the social media aspect. The life of influencers and social media addiction is right up my alley. I was enjoying it in the beginning, but it started to drag. Everything felt like it was "too much". The writing and the wit was trying too hard, the character was too unlikeable, the humor too forced. Based on the description I was expecting more varied writing style (texts, emails, etc.). However, most of it was prose. This was not a book for me, which is a shame because I was really looking forward to it. Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books/Scout Press for the ARC.

There are some witty, insightful bits in this novel. Lines like, “When oh when will they create a Breathalyzer app that disables your phone when you’re over the limit?” Unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to care about a character is so spectacularly concerned about herself and absolutely no one else. It’s remarkable that she was able to maintain a relationship with a man for any length of time.

Over the course to the book, Jenny McClaine lets the readers know about her complicated relationship with her mother, and that’s apparently why she needs adoration from people she doesn’t know on social media. The character is twelve years younger than me, and it’s fun when something you post gets a lot of likes, but I can’t identify at all with someone who is constantly on her phone with pretend friendships, spending HOURS debating about the wording of a Tweet and how many kisses (Xs) she should leave on a DM.
Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

I was hesitant to pick this one up because of its comparison to Fleabag and Sally Rooney (neither of which are my thing, SHOCK HORROR) but I watched a review of it and was instantly drawn in by the croissant scene at the beginning. I'm so glad I picked this up. I've really been enjoying seeing more books focusing in on women in their mid-to-late thirties, which I feel like hasn't been as represented at the 20s and 40s in the past few years (at least in the general fiction and lit-fic genres) and I found the discussions of social media addiction SO real and SO raw (I know more than a few people who could benefit from dealing with their own super unhealthy relationships to Instagram) and I loved the way the author wove in that topic with grief, career, family, motherhood, and friendship. I did feel like the last 1/4 or were not as tight as the first part of the book, and the plot veered off a bit, but I think this book will be one of the most talked about of the year and will likely be henceforth named among the modern millennial classics (Conversations with Friends, Severance, The New Me, Queenie, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, etc.)