2/5 stars

I really really wanted to like this book and thought that the premise was intriguing but the book itself fell a little flat for me. I wasn't a big fan of the writing and I wish that there was more closure for Eartha. I do love the cover graphics though!

i find this review a very difficult one to write. from start to finish, i really didn’t like this book. i personally found this to be a hot mess.

a big struggle for me was the characters. i really didn’t like them, nor could i relate to them in any way. they acted like thirteen year old girls, except they were adults.

the relationship between eartha and her best friend rose wasn’t the best either. i felt eartha didn’t treat her friend very well, nor did she ever apologize for the way she acted towards her. honestly, eartha was a bitch to her. and basically ignored anything rose ever said in regards to her queer experiences (as eartha is very naïve, even though rose tells her all these stories).

the writing style really didn’t work well. there was random passages where we got a bit of an overview of the situation, noted with time stamps. i found these really weird, and oddly formatted too.

aside from all of those things, the biggest issue i had with this book was how cringey it was. it’s worse than reading old text posts from 2012 tumblr. combined with the “dark comedy” aka downright cringey sexual innuendoes, i just couldn’t take it seriously. it was bad.

overall? i wish i hadn’t read this book. it felt like a waste of time.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for giving me access to the free advanced digital copy of this book.

The plot of this book sounded really interesting and I was genuinely excited to read it. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me and became a DNF. I found the writing style to be really flat and hard to get into. The narrator didn't really feel like she had a unique voice, and certainly not one that could hold my attention through the whole novel. On top of that, the way that bisexuality, gender expression and identity, social media fame, and sexual assault were. written about was really uncomfortable and cringey to read. In addition to all the content issues of Girl Crush, the ARC e-book formatting was horrendous. There were 3-5 words typed together and then spaces and new lines in the middle of sentences and single words that were spaced lines apart letter by letter. Hopefully that was just a formatting issue with the ARC and will be corrected in the final e-book format.

Based on the one-star reviews attacking the author, Girlcrush is an instance of art imitating life imitating art.

How should a reader approach a novel about how social media influences our mental and physical wellbeing? I don’t know how ‘problematic’ Florence Givens is or whether this book is thinly-veiled, self-insert fiction. The story delivered on its promises by giving Eartha a believable character arc from a young artist emotionally abused by her boyfriend, to a burgeoning social media sensation burning with righteous anger, to a woman whose sense of reality is destroyed by algorithms and corporate greed, and finally to a person who begins to recover by rejecting the lies told to her and about her. The author clearly has talent. I look forward to her next novel.

This book was amazing!!! I absolutely loved it and could not put it down. I highly recommend this book.

Yeaaaah... no. This reeked of white feminism and had some bioessentialism that made me wildly uncomfy on top of the book itself just being...weird? I was very confused. I would like my time back.

genuinely feel bad being so harsh on an author's debut novel but this was not a novel. i understand ARCs can be a little unfinished but this was genuinely a first draft, the narrative is all over the place, the characters are tiring clichés, the prose is very much 8th grader who just discovered self insert fanfic... it's actually sad because the topics that the story wants to tackle are worth exploring, and the author obviously has an inside point of view on the trappings of influence and virality. there is even a cinematic ambition of sorts but honestly it would've been better off sold as a script idea to a screenwriter who knows what they're doing... this was just a mess.

 I received an eARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Great read but I much preferred the first book from this author. Still a good read and I think alot of women would like it.

Thank you Netgalley for the advance reader copy of Girlcrush by Florence Given in exchange for an honest review. I really enjoyed this book. It delved into what is reality and what makes something real. When you create a whole new persona from your dreams and spend more time as that, does that become your reality or just make you unstable? I thought this was a very thought provoking book and am really glad I read it.

Unfortunately, I was unable to finish this book. While I know it is an advanced copy, the grammar and spelling errors made this story unreadable. Girlcrush read like lousy fanfiction written by a preteen. I will not be picking up anything else from this author in the future.

In Given's debut novel, we follow Eartha on a wild, weird and seductive modern-day exploration as she commences life as an openly bisexual woman whilst also becoming a viral sensation on Wonder Land, a social media app where people project their dream selves online. But as her online self and her offline self become more and more distanced, trauma from her past comes back to haunt and destroy her present.

I loved the idea of this one with an enticing blurb but in reality, it felt rushed and lacked depth. The first half focused on Eartha coming out as bisexual, after leaving her longterm toxic relationship with her boyfriend, whereas the second half centred more about her engulfment into social media and its dark reality. The plot itself felt quite messy and sadly Eartha was unlikeable.

I really wanted to love this one more.

Enjoyable and if you've read the author's previous work, pretty much the same message in fictional form.

This was painful and predictable. It reads like an inexperienced YA writer trying their hand at something 'edgy'. The only thing I enjoyed about this is the occasional 'directors notes' sprinkled in, even if they didn't always flow well.

(ARC from NetGalley) Saw another reviewer say something along the lines of “…I had the overwhelming urge to eat my own spine” and that sums it up pretty well. Pretty obvious self-insert from the author— it’s feminism but only if you’re white, wealthy and beautiful.

Without being mean, I’ll just say that I prefer Florence Given’s art style to her writing.

I tried to give this book the best crack that I could reading it. Unfortunately, sometimes an authors writing style just isn't for you. I was hoping to not be able to put it down like some of the other readers but for me it was more, trying to force myself to read it and hope that the story would finally grab me.

I think the ultimate problem for me is that I love characters, and the characters didn't grab me. The events themselves don't bother me, and the insights of our modern day are there. But if I don't care about these people, I simply cant find a way to get to the end.

I wish Florence nothing but the best, just because this wasn't for me, doesn't mean it's not any good.

Girlcrush surprised me in many ways. The story is quite wild and I found that it exceeded genre limitations. This is not just a queer romance. This is also a dystopia, with subtle sci-fi elements.

It was fascinating to follow Eartha, a bi artist and accidental influencer, on her journey of self-discovery and fame. Set in the near-future, Given imagined a world in which social media consumption has taken on an even more taken-for-granted role in our lives. As Eartha rebels against homonormativity and tries to make use of the platform to her benefit, she also has to grapple with the effect of her transformation on her friendships and desires.
This was the first novel I read that had an important character who uses they/them pronouns. I really loved the non-binary character Rose and wished they were even more part of the story.

Overall, this was a 4.5 read for me.

I love Florence Given, but this felt very forced. It seemed the entire book was constructed around one central point that Given wanted to drive home and did not flow naturally. Unfortunately, it fell completely flat for me which is a shame because the description sounded amazing.

This book was an emotional rollercoaster but I could not put it down! I can't wait to add this to my physical shelf on release day.

a bisexual jekyll and hyde retelling?! SIGN ME UP! i loved what Flotence did with this debut and the topics that's discussed are things i think everyone should talk about. social media can be a wonderful place but it's also dangerous.