Pretty good!

A few days of thinking about it and I’m still not sure if I like Del. Lee had a really great quote toward her in the very last chapter: “I could never hate you. You’re too pathetic to hate. Especially now.”And yeah I’m having a hard time writing her off as unlikeable because of her trauma.

She’s scrappy and stubborn and rude and will accept sympathy but lashes out when anyone tries to pity her or meaningfully reach out.

You know what in the coarse of writing this I realize I do like her cause she’s relatable. This gets four stars now.

Just Watch Me started off strong for me, but the further I got, the more it lost me. The pacing felt all over the place—sometimes dragging, sometimes rushing—and by the end I wasn’t sure what the book wanted to be. My biggest issue was Del…I just didn’t get why she sucked so much. The story kept telling me she was terrible, but I never really understood why, and that made it hard to care about her downfall. There were definitely moments where Lior’s writing shined, but overall it felt uneven and left me more confused than satisfied.

SET TO FEATURE ON THE SEPTEMBER 11TH EDITION OF THE BOOKISH DROP

Billed as “Fleabag meets Big Swiss”, I'm confident Just Watch Me is set to be an ‘It book’ when it’s released next year - I can just imagine it with a cover similar to Yellowface and The List and popping up all over BookTok. Whether I enjoyed it or not, that’s something I’m still figuring out.

Lior Torenberg’s debut novel follows a charismatic outsider who livestreams herself for seven consecutive days to raise funds for her comatose sister's life support. Dell Danvers is barely holding on.

Dell will be instantly relatable to many thanks to the fact she has money troubles (behind on rent for her bathroom-less studio apartment) and is ignoring nagging health issues (a perpetual, spiking stomach pain). However, the fact that her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug is a far less universal experience.

Sick of surviving on selling plant cuttings to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to raise $14,000 for a week of private life support for her little sister.

Dell soon realises that she has a knack for eating spicy food, which quickly propels her to streaming fame, but a troll-turned-incel threatens to reveal her dark past.

Just Watch Me is incredibly easy to consume in one sitting, thanks to being narrated seven fast-paced chapters, each representing a day of Dell's livestream.

It’s a sharp commentary on the voyeuristic nature of social media and the American healthcare system but I can’t help but wonder if it’s as funny and dark as it is clearly trying to be.

Just Watch Me is sold as “touching reflection on love, loss, and forgiveness” but it wasn’t for me. Without dropping any spoilers, I didn’t feel connected enough to Dell or any of the supporting characters to be primed to react emotionally when tragedy appears on the page.

In short, it’s a book I don’t regret reading, and would likely recommend to a friend looking for something a little different, but I feel a few extra chapters could have really spiced things up (pun intended).

A couple of things - the character of Lee appears to be non-binary, given Dell always refers to them using gender neutral pronouns. While it's nice that a NB character can just exist in a novel without their story being focussed on their gender identity. The lack of clarification got a little distracting. When a streamer says 'she's hot' about Lee, it got me wondering if I had overthought Dell always using they/them pronouns. But then Dell's mum doesn't misgender her towards the end of the book. I know readers shouldn't need everything spelling out to them but I feel a confirmation mid-way would have worked.

This was alright. I was impressed with the writing, there were some really great lines. But for the most part, it just seemed unbelievable-- I didn't believe in the character or the lie or that the character believed the lie. It just didn't work for me.

Just Watch Me was dry, funny, strange and moving. Everything I love in my weird girl lit fic! What an absolutely wonderful book. I tore through this in hours! Dell was (in my opinion) a perfect narrator for this work. She was awful but endearing. She was messy and unsophisticated yet clever and persevering. The livestream aspect of this book was so well done. The chat sections were so perfectly written- something I imagine was not easy to do! I am so impressed with this and I will be reading anything Lior writes going forward!

3 stars

Dell Danvers is quite the mess. She’s barely scraping by in NYC in an illegal apartment, she’s just lost her job and her sister is in a coma at a fancy hospital that is ready to pull the plug. Dell needs money fast. She decides to fundraise/live stream for seven days to make rent and to raise enough to pay for one week of private care for her sister.

Dell’s followers mount as she gets into eating hot peppers for cash while her life continues to spiral. Will Dell find a way out?

The book skewed a bit young for me but I still enjoyed it. Dell seems to make a very wrong decision possible…but she makes it look a little too easy to make money online. Interesting book. 3.4 stars.

If Ottessa Moshfegh's protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation decided to take up live streaming.

My girl, Dell, she's a disaster. She can't hold down a job, her apartment is a literal walk-in closet, her sister is in a coma, she has a strained relationship with her mom and she has to miraculously come up with $14,000 to keep her sister on life support plus her rent in the span of a week. SO, in a desperate attempt to amend the latter, she takes up live streaming 24/7 and it gets weird...but I just couldn't look away.

We have a shitshow, with a slightly unhinged woman as the star-- it's sharp, it's scandalous and it's a fucking blast!

Just Watch Me takes the meaning of spice in a book to a whole new level and I can't wait until everyone can get their hands on it next year.