I don’t know why on earth I signed up for this one. My respect for the publisher, probably. Anyway, I found it unbearable from the start: unappealing prose and characters and the promise of horrors and ugliness to come, literally. I decided to sever my relationship with it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Boldwood Books as well as the author for this ARC in exchange for my unbiased review.
#NetGalley #BoldwoodBooks #3amShatteredMumsClub #NinaManning

I never get tired of books like this. New motherhood is an insanely unique and difficult experience and the more it gets normalized, the more people can be helped. This book gives this storyline to us in the form of Sofy, Mel, and Aisha. Three new moms who just need to know that they’re not alone, especially during the middle of the night feedings. Some of the best friendships are formed under duress.
Books about motherhood are a dime a dozen. The joys of motherhood, the rewards of motherhood are often lauded and rightly so. Motherhood is not, however, all joys and rewards. Each stage comes with its own challenges. The newborn stage is unique, though, in that mom is also a newborn in the sense that she’s new to this role in her life. Even when it’s not her first baby, it’s still a new person with his/her own personality and individual needs. This is the time where I, as a new mother, found the most difficult, at least so far. It’s the time in which one gets no sleep, no break. Her own needs aren’t considered at all. All of this and more in addition to the most significant change that her life can experience. It’s a very lonely and difficult time. The new mom is also recovering from a traumatic physical event as well. Postpartum depression is very real and very isolating. Not to mention the guilt that kicks in immediately. She is positive that she’s screwing things up! All of these things and more are happening to these three characters. They find each other through a Mom and Baby group that they’re all forced to attend. When the first meeting gets canceled, Sofy, Aisha, and Mel decide to go get coffee and manage to forge an ironclad friendship that saves each woman from her own traumas. I felt that each woman is relatable and I grew to care deeply about. I’ve been there too.
There are no criticisms I can give here. I loved this book. I feel deeply grateful to Ms. Manning for writing this. It’s so important to keep these things normalized. Thank you so much for this book and these characters.

I did not finish this book. It lost me because there were just too many characters to keep track of and the point of view continually changed. It was just too confusing. This bok is about a group of teens in a small town all suddenly acting strange, nudged along by an unseen force, getting in between friendships and and altering their level of depravity. This book was not for me.

A great teen Gothic. I'm fascinated by stories that are interrogating teenagers in the modern era and this one does a great job of digging into how it is both the same and different from how it was when I was a teenager -- and it's got some great chills to boot, too.

Really really not for me. I don't mind reading stuff that doesn't feel believable - but there was nothing about String Follow that made me want to suspend my disbelief - it was a struggle to page through.

A few years ago I read Simon Jacob's excellent book Palaces, an apocalyptic novel that explores a young couples end of the world ennui.

String Follow is much more intensive look at a group of violently lethargic teens, in a seemingly parentless universe. With little to no supervision all of our characters are singularly destructive. A collection of completely nihilistic narratives told by greened-out couch surfers, migraine-manic punk singers, or the teen girl that didn't sleep with her high school boyfriend while they were together but will now that they're broken up.

Not every storyline worked for me, and I struggled a little through the middle of the book, but the barbaric and bloody conclusion is worth the price of admission. It was absolutely feral.

Thank you to MCD + FSG Originals and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.

String Follow definitely missed the mark for me. I also feel the synopsis of the book is very misleading because it is listed as a horror, “suburban gothic” novel but this book is not “horror” and it is not “gothic” The story was not very believable and I feel like it was too drawn out. Overall, I wasn’t a fan and would not recommend this one.

Published by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on February 1, 2022

String Follow is marketed as “a darkly comic suburban Gothic.” There’s no doubt that the novel is dark. School shootings are as dark as it gets, and the novel’s school shooting is only a small part of the violence that pervades the story. But school shootings aren’t the stuff of comedy. How String Follow can be marketed as “darkly comic” is bewildering.

The characters are teens in Adena, Ohio. The real Adena, a small village at least an hour’s drive from Pittsburg, is more rural than suburban, but a novelist is free to change the reality of locations. The fictional Adena appears to change its size and shape as characters drive through streets that are simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable.

The story is narrated by a lurking presence (marketing materials describe it as a “malevolent force”) that purportedly helps the teens understand their choices “and see their architecture, the brutal structure behind them, as dense and complex and orderly as a blood spray.” The plot culminates in a “Death Party” at the (supposedly empty) home of a character who is presumed to be dead but is inconveniently alive — a party orchestrated by the malevolent force. String Follow is more of a horror novel than a dark comedy. I suppose horror alone suffices to convince marketing departments to describe a novel as “Gothic.” The underlying premise seems to be that it’s pretty horrifying to be a teen.

The characters are lost in their teen angst. Beth “bottled and buried her rage within herself,” instinctively turning her back and retreating from conflict. Her older brother Greg is seeing a psychiatrist who has him on Risperdal. Greg doesn’t tell his shrink about the voice he hears, the voice that begins to dictate his behavior. Beth also hears a voice that tells her what to do, although its not as demanding as her brother’s voice. Beth feels like she’s trapped in a tower and believes she sees colors that she interprets as souls.

Not to be outdone, Sarah spends an inexplicable amount of time thinking about colored lights. Her colors are not necessarily souls, but she sometimes perceives them as bodies. Purple seems to be a guiding light. Sarah can’t have sex without entertaining colorful scattered thoughts: “On the bed, she separated from her body,” a perspective that allows her to notice “the yellow of David’s room to the filtered gray palette of the world beyond him” and the “furious white” sky, an “impossibly dense color of equal violence” creating an atmosphere “as thick as language.” Readers who can decipher that prose might find String Follow to be a real treat.

Sarah is Beth’s best friend until she’s not. Sarah is also David’s girlfriend until they break up, and then his lover when he’s nice to her until she decides he’s not being nice, after all. David is given to “pornographic cult fantasies” but otherwise seems to be living in oblivion. During their breakup, Sarah hangs out with Greg, whose attention she enjoys until she doesn’t. Sarah has a driving need to be popular and to solve other people’s problems, then feels her friends are using her when they allow her to impose her will upon them. It's not surprising that Sarah drives away her friend Claire, a minor character who is embarrassed by her family’s prosperity.

Tyler and Rhea are the other key characters, although Rhea is something of a nonentity unless she’s bleeding. For a time, Tyler and Rhea explore Adena and surrounding communities, avoiding their homes and parents. Tyler then discovers that David left the house unlocked while his parents were taking an out-of-town trip. Tyler takes over the teen cave that David made for himself in the basement, locking David out. David thinks it is odd that the basement door is suddenly locked but his teen ennui prevents him from doing anything about it. Tyler eventually invites Rhea to join him in David’s basement. Using David’s computer, Tyler invites a younger girl named Marcy to join him, promising to fuck her to death if she brings weed, to which Marcy (who calls herself Typhus) responds “when and where?” Inviting Marcy turns out to be a bad decision, one that adds to the flowing blood that eventually drowns the story.

Claire becomes a fan of a teen named Graham, a member of a punk band who is locally famous for self-inducing blinding migraines so that he can express his pain through his music until he passes out. Later, a kid named Adam who suffers the same affliction (did Graham relocate and change his name?) is present during a school shooting that occurs late in the novel. He does nothing after noticing the gun. Adam then obsessively replays videos, watching himself and blaming himself for the bullet that struck one of the victims after he collapsed in pain.

With all these characters, String Fellow produces enough teen angst to power a small country. The malevolent force (self-described only as “we”) might be responsible for the colors that plague Sarah and Beth and the voices in Greg’s head. It is explicitly responsible for the school shooting, for Adam’s migraines, and for the Death Party, among other acts of violence. Perhaps malevolence directed at the reader motivates the narrating force to explain the inner thoughts of insecure teen characters. Too many paragraphs are devoted to internal monologues as characters fret about each new source of anxiety.

The malevolent force might not be a reliable narrator, given that events near the novel’s end involving Tyler and Rhea and Sarah make no sense at all. Near the end, Tyler leaves the basement with his friends in tow, only to return to the house (where he picks up Sarah as she flees from David) without appearing to recognize it as the same house he just vacated. Deliberate ambiguity is built into the story’s conclusion, ambiguity that creates pointless confusion. The force appears to be clouding the minds of the characters. It certainly clouded my mind, giving me an Graham/Adam-like headache as I tried to follow the plot. A lengthy passage in all caps seems to suggest that all possible versions of the story are simultaneously true, while a passage that follows in normal type suggests that alternative versions of the story could just as easily be told. Those passages made me say out loud: “Just pick a story and stick to it.” Perhaps the novel is meant to be experimental. If so, the experiment left me frustrated.

String Follow envisions evil as an external and sentient presence. Many writers have made that suggestion. It might be comforting to attribute teen violence that has no obvious explanation — and there’s plenty of that in String Follow — to a malevolent force rather than mental illness or poor parenting. As a society, we only have ourselves to blame for society’s failure to recognize the symptoms of mental illness or violence-prone kids and to intervene before tragedy ensues. Attributing violence to an amorphous evil seems like copout, although Simon Jacobs does try to have it both ways by portraying Adena as a town where adult supervision of teens is entirely absent.

On a more positive note, Jacobs’ prose is creative and robust. When they aren’t whining about their lives or behaving as if they are characters in a slasher movie, the kids occasionally do something interesting (the idea of taking over a random basement and using it as a hangout is cool). Had the story tried to explore teen violence as the product of something other than an evil force, it might have been compelling. I shouldn’t criticize a writer for failing to write a different book — the kind of book I might have enjoyed more — but I think it’s fair to criticize a writer for making a choice that doesn’t work. The “malevolent forces make kids bad” theme is too banal to succeed, despite offering some stirring moments to fans of gore.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

2.5 stars. Though the description of this book made it seem right up my alley, in the end String Follow and I were just not a good fit.

This novel is loosely narrated by some unspecified, supernatural "we" who is inhabiting teenagers in Adena, Ohio, moving among them and appealing to their worst natures to make these teens commit unspeakable acts of violence and destruction. The book focuses on a core group of eight of these teens, switching perspectives between them frequently, and explores the ways they succumb to or fight the malevolent force that seeks to control their minds and actions.

On one hand, this novel is a brilliant metaphor for modern teenagerhood. The world of String Follow explores the challenges that today's teens face through a darkly sinister lens. It seeks to examine what society would look like if teenagers, who are already impulsive and irrational and emotionally immature, were compelled to react with violence and brutality. In a cerebral, hypnotic narrative, it exposes the seedy underbelly of suburbia, the darkness beneath the surface of daily life, the horrors just waiting for their moment to be unleashed. I think calling this a "suburban Gothic" is spot-on.

On the other hand, though, the pace is excruciatingly slow, and not a lot actually happens. There's a sense of everything building to one big culmination, and I did like the surprisingly optimistic conclusion after all the nihilism that came before -- but it was hard for me to stay focused on everything leading up to the ending. It was just...dull. The shifting perspectives and Jacobs' tendency to go off on tangents made me feel off-balance and somewhat confused throughout the entire book, and it became a struggle just to finish. I do think I got the message Jacobs was trying to get across, and I do admire the creativity of his execution, but the book would've been a lot stronger in my opinion if it was less esoteric and more edited.

There is a quiet horror influencing the youth of Adena, Ohio. A mysterious force that doesn’t poison their young hearts but rather distorts their desires into something sinister. Simon Jacobs delivers an oddly curious and uncanny horror tale in String Follow.

String Follow by Simon Jacobs is narrated by this mysterious force. As readers, we are privy to its musing as it stalks various characters. Beth lives in the shadow of her abusive and psychotic brother, Greg. David turns to incel-like cults and fantasies when his love is unreturned from Sarah. Unbeknownst to him, Tyler has found refuge in David’s basement. We follow a web of these characters and more, all seemingly random and yet, their fates are all intertwined.

In String Follow, Simon Jacobs does a brilliant job of portraying the youthful lives of those in the Midwest. Often, his characters’ actions and thoughts linger between the mundane and the bizarre. He accentuates their whims and impulses. He portrays their erratic behaviors believably. String Follow is about observing seemingly disjointed actions from all its characters steadily become tangled with each other.

String Follow has a flair that is reminiscent of Donnie Darko and The Twilight Zone. Simon Jacobs’s prose is particularly notable. The way in which the author writes is spellbinding and invokes an atmosphere of dread. As enticing as it is unsettling, his prose is the highlight of this novel.

Simon Jacobs does not humor his readers with jump scares, but a slow unraveling of atrocities committed by his characters. While the mysterious force can be perceived as unworldly, the horrors set in String Follow are grounded in unfortunate reality. Woven between the scenes of teenage meanderings, we are exposed to parental neglect, shootings, abuse, and violence.

This gothic novel does suffer from having one too many characters. Some character arcs felt lacking in comparison to the rest. On a few occasions, the abundance of characters hindered the momentum of the story. Since we have the perspective of the mysterious force but are blinded to its intensions, it is easy to miss the importance of certain individuals. The best strategy is to let the mysterious force reveal and connect these characters for you. It does come together at the end.

String Follow is a dark and somber coming-of-age tale. It begs us to give credence to the dark parts of ourselves. Jealousy and anger are not fleeting sentiments. With a simple nudge, they can consume a person.

Review originally posted in Grimdark Magazine.

This reads so far has gotten mixed reviews, and I agree with that. I'm struggling to come up with an exact review or feedback to give. The author clearly has a great grasp on prose and the use of satirical writing, but I think the storyline is just too dark for me to really enjoy. For those looking for a dark satire, this may be more up your alley than mine.

It's not a bad read, I just think I'm the wrong audience for this. Because of that I have to decided to give three stars.

The comments above are mine with no influence.

This book had me at the edge of my seat! It had this crazy and creepy atmosphere that sucked me into the story. I felt hypnotic and honestly kept looking over my shoulder while reading.
The different pov’s made the plot deep and multi-layered. I totally encourage every horror and thriller fan to read this book!

I found this book a bit to confusing. It seemed as if the author couldn’t figure out the plot themselves. I did like some of the aspects such as the atmosphere and characters but it just hit the mark for me all together.

This was a very interesting premise, but unfortunately, something about the writing style and my brain just didn't gel at this time. I made it about 10% in before I realized this book just wasn't for me. That being said I think the story is great and many others will LOVE String Follow. So I will give it a 3/5

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, MCD x FSG Originals for providing me with an e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I must admit I found String Follow a hard book to review. The concept behind the book was definitely intriguing: malicious force exerting influence a group of teens in Adena Ohio. It’s billed as ‘darkly comic suburban Gothic’, and I’d say that’s a fair description, but must also say it was not without some problems. We quickly get introduced to quite a few characters (perhaps too many), all with their own issues, continually switch POVs, and I must admit the frequent switching made it a little difficult for me to keep the characters straight. I’d might have had an easier time keeping track of everything—those frequent POV changes—had this been a movie. That being said, it was a fairly well written story that’s genuinely creepy at times. 3.5 stars.

I’d like to thank Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for the chance to read and review an eARC of String Follow.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R1HET0GQTO9C1S/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/string-follow-simon-jacobs/1139212064?ean=9780374603854&bvnotificationId=42a79446-83e9-11ec-91ee-129c09ff4731&bvmessageType=REVIEW_APPROVED&bvrecipientDomain=gmail.com#review/199782142

I'm really not sure what I just read. Was it some sort of existentialist treatise, or just a confused Sci-Fi melodrama? The book is listed under horror and described as "A darkly comic suburban Gothic about a malevolent force that targets a group of Ohio misfits, harnessing their angst for its sinister designs." However, there was nothing whatsoever about the narrative that read "horror" to me (and I read TONS of horror); there was nothing humorous except for the occasional sardonic comment; I'm not even sure exactly how you define "suburban Gothic" but suburban, I guess I'll give the book that. I'd say this was cosmic horror minus the horror only because it's narrated by some cosmic force that "enters" various teenagers to observe and to some degree direct their behavior. But the story is so drawn out and confusing has character doing just ridiculously unbelievable things (like two, and eventually three, claiming residence for almost three weeks in the downstairs of another, though he doesn't know who has taken over his basement, just that he's now locked out of it and resigns himself to the fact without ever checking or doing anything about it. The most redeeming factor of the novel is the writing/verbiage is solid, but the story is so meandering and convoluted that I drew no enjoyment from it.

This is told in alternating point of views from all the characters: Claire, David, Tyler, Greg, and Sarah. Although it's told in alternating POV, all the teenagers interact with each other in some way and have a lot of inner dialogue so it almost feels like one point of view. Interesting way to frame it but also made the narrative jumpy and a little confusing. This was advertised as a suburban Gothic with a malevolent force. That's really what drew me in but def not enough to keep me. I did like the small town vibe of this, though it fit well with everything going on. I did want more from the "malevolent force" but as a lover of horror that's probably just a personal preference. Also, are there no parents in this town?

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

String Follow by Simon Jacobs struck me on Netgalley as just the type of book I would like: dark comedy mixed with horror revolving around a mysterious entity that locks onto a group of misfits and their teenage angst. It's a very Kingian set up, and it does start out fairly strongly, as we're introduced to a bevy of messed up teens and are privy to their inner monologuing and drama. Unfortunately for me, it quickly began to fall about. I like to think I have a decently discerning mind for picking up on differences in characters and telling their voices apart in novels, but in String Follow there are so many introduced in such a short time that they began to meld together for me after a bit. In a way, the characters seem more like caricatures of teenagers; over the top enough that it becomes immersion breaking.

**I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley**

In the quiet Ohio suburb of Adena, a strange force lurks on the fringes of the lives of local teenagers. These teens are alienated souls, for the most part failed by bad parenting and the lack of a strong moral core. The force flits from teen to teen, looking to be a catalyst for malevolence or at least guilt, taking advantage of mental illness to sink its hooks more insidiously into the vulnerable and alone. Its voice speaks out in words of insight, even as its motives for influencing its victims remain opaque:

QUOTE
We didn’t change you, so much as extrapolate the way a series of [...] decisions could change you, could shape an entirely new course: the decisions that, taken one after another after another after another, cause a person, over time, to bend, to warp–like the way the backs of your hands become inured to cold through exposure, like the way skin grows back tough and ridged over a deep wound, like when you learn to hold your breath for longer and longer[.]

Not everyone had it in them, the ability to look at these choices and see their architecture, the brutal structure behind them, as dense and complex and orderly as a blood spray. But some of them did[.]
END QUOTE

The “them” in this book are a loose network of kids who attend Adena High School. The closest thing we have to a heroine is empathetic, popular Sarah, the most level-headed of the bunch but also, perhaps, the most naive. She just broke up with David, whose efforts to get her back are rooted less in love than in revenge. David’s efforts are somewhat hampered by Sarah’s growing closeness to her best friend’s older brother Greg. Beth, her best friend, would likely feel alienated by this rapport if she weren’t herself busy faking sick from school in order to hide the real illness gnawing away at her insides.

Meanwhile, neglected, dissociative Tyler has snuck into David’s basement and is quietly living there, unbeknownst to David or to David’s absentee mom. Their friend Collin is grieving the suicide of his sister, and finds himself drawn to a mysterious group of people meeting in a VFW hall out in the middle of nowhere. As these kids search for meaning, often hiding behind a smokescreen of weed or a hard shell of (often pretend) violence and sex, the force begins to work on them, seeking to exploit their weaknesses in order to bring actual violence and harm into the world, culminating in one apocalyptic night that will change their lives forever.

In many ways, the force described within these pages reads like a metaphor for the irrational impulses of adolescence, guided by emotion and drama instead of reflection and vulnerability. As an entity, it’s never really explained in the novel, which does however dive deeply into the psyche of midwestern America’s disaffected youth, as here with Claire, a wealthy teenager from a neighboring suburb who’s desperately searching for her authentic self:

QUOTE
She felt she lived her life in different modes: the school one, the outside-school one, the punk one, the online one, the alone one, the parents one, the rich one. They existed separately, these modes, but often several layered atop each other, like layers of a transparency, while others could never overlap. She thought others must have them, too.
END QUOTE

Fuelled by a punk rock aesthetic that aims for humor but in the process exposes its own wounded heart, String Follow is a book that endeavors to externalize the chaos of adolescence and perhaps bring meaning to the epidemic of violence that’s racked American high schools these last few decades. There’s a 1980s sensibility to the splatterpunk goings-on that’s tempered by a more 21st century empathy, making for a modern horror novel that will appeal to anyone who vividly remembers still the scars of adolescence and the almost cultish search for meaning that can linger long into adulthood.

And for all the book’s blood and carnage, a spark of hope does remain in its final pages. Not all of the teenagers described here will survive once the force is through with them, but perhaps enough of them will be able to find their ways back to friendship and kindness, eschewing nihilism for a brighter path, in a tentatively optimistic reflection of today’s actual youth.

One of my infatuations is learning as much as I can about the history of the massive tornado that afflicted real-life Xenia, Ohio, in early April 1974. I’m not sure what fuels this infatuation — it could be that it is a disaster that happened on the cusp of my birth (I was born a year later) and thus brings some sense of an event that’s peppered with the nostalgia of how things used to be for me. It could be the scope of the event: my understanding is that about two-thirds of the city was levelled by the twister. Whatever the case, I’m not the only one who was fascinated by what happened on that April day in 1974. Filmmaker Harmony Korine released a film in 1997 called Gummo, whose loose narrative follows several children and teenagers who are coping with the aftermath of the Xenia tornado (though the film was not shot in Xenia). Gummo is a poorly made film, but it can be entertaining. (The scene where a young man wrestles with and destroys a metal chair sticks out for me.)

To this end, author Simon Jacobs has entered stage left with a fictional tale set in another Ohio town that features disaffected teenagers. Though no tornado has ripped the town of Adena, Ohio, apart, it is possessed by a malevolent force that wants to infect its young inhabitants — as the story in Jacobs’ novel String Follow goes. The book is told from the point-of-view of this force and it is a loosely plotted story about a series of teenagers who largely inhabit dark desires. In the novel, it should be noted that dialogue is minimally used, and parents are barely seen or heard from. These teenagers are wrestling with internal thoughts and seem to have been abandoned by the adults in the world. These teenagers generally come from wealthy and privileged backgrounds and are almost exclusively White. A few of them are Goths or Punks and colour their hair frequently. And these teens generally do awful things. One of these teens, Tyler, takes over the sprawling basement of another young character named David’s house, then proceeds to steal David’s online identity so Tyler can post sordid things on David’s Facebook account. Nice kid, eh?

I don’t think I’ll go much farther than that in describing String Follow. Besides, there’s not much in the way of a plot that moves things forward — things happen, and then stories are told in flashbacks, and then someone does something icky to someone else and thus it goes on. There’s no linear narrative to be had here — which is not necessarily a bad thing — but parts of the novel can be confusing to read because at least one character changes names, and the novel jumps around from character to character — some of whom are relegated to “barely seen from until they are needed” status. The novel just drifts until a violent and chaotic ending, where I’m not entirely sure what happened and is by far way overlong. That said, I do want to be a nice guy and say the odd, nice thing about this book. One, Jacobs has talent. He can write sections of prose as though they are poetry, in the best tradition of current literary writers. There’s a whole swath of the book dedicated to characters seeing colours in their field of vision and what that all means. Though I was bored to tears by these descriptions, I do acknowledge the fact that these sections are well written. And, for a book that’s about teenage angst and malaise, Jacobs can perfectly capture a feeling and a sense of portending doom for some of these characters. You really feel the dark emotions that these characters are going through.

But here’s the $64,000 question: Does the world, right now, need yet another book (or film, or song, or piece of art) that is all about the anguish of the life of the modern teenager? Me, I really wish people like Jacobs would write the type of novels that would empower teenagers to change the world for the better. Why can’t we have a novel about young adults striving to start a successful small business? Or a book about kids who tackle climate change? Or solve world peace? Or generally, change the world for the better? These types of books, to me, seem to be a rarity, and all we get are books (and songs, and movies, etc.) about how the years of being a teenager — of being stuck between being a child and an adult — are horrible and confusing. You know, I consider my teen years not to be exactly great (and my 20s were probably even worse as I pursued my ego and tried to be someone famous as a journalist — which is a poor way of living one’s life), but I doubt that the narrative about teen years being a wasteland no longer really needs to be told. I get it: being a teenager totally sucks.

However, as much as this is an attitude seen through a particular lens in this novel, if the reality of the situation were really told, it might be that if you’re rich, privileged, and White, as these characters mostly are, your teen years might have its usual ups and downs. Few of these characters would, say, get carded at a traffic stop. Thus, it was hard for me to get invested in this novel — even though parts of it are darkly comedic (though the dark stuff mostly gets played as being straight) and some of it is a touch entertaining. In the end, I’m not quite sure what to think about String Follow. It’s the type of novel that nobody really needs to read with the world being currently being on metaphoric and literal fire, something that we need to do something about and not just stew in a smorgasbord of depravity and hopelessness. At the same time, there might be young people out there for whom this book may resonate — even though this is not really a book meant for young adults, per se. So, I really don’t know what my take on String Follow really is. However, my ultimate thought is along these lines: String Follows is a book about teenage trash masquerading as art. If that sounds like your bag, then dig in. It’s all yours to read, but only if you want to.