This was an insane book that every parent should have to read!! It was full of twists, mind blowing, eye opening and so well written. Truly couldn't put it down!

Someone Just Followed You is exactly the kind of thriller that feels ripped from today’s headlines. Liane Child takes influencer culture, internet fame, and our obsession with social media and twists them into something deeply unsettling.

Thank you Netgalley, HQ Digital and Liane Child for the chance to read and review and ARC of Someone Just Followed You. This is my first book by this author and I look foward to more from her.

Someone Just Followed You follows the story of Maple Clark, a fourteen year kidfluencer. She feels misunderstood by her parents, awkward around boys, but she is an internet sensation with nearly 2 million followers. Maple enjoys creating content but Maple's mom has complete control of career, creating content to the point of oversharing.

Maple creates her own channel, much to her mom, Kirsten's disappointment. It involves searching for a fellow influencer who just disappeared and left everyone wondering where she went. One day, Maple herself just disappears.

This story was told from several points of view, Maple, Kirsten the mom and Him-an unknown person from the internet. Kirsten was the worst kind of mom. She didn't really care about her children and was only interested in creating content, getting the likes and followers. It also makes you think about the dangers of AI, what you share and how much of what you share. It got really creepy at one point when there was a reveal about the AI. There were definitely some twists I was not expecting and when I got close to the end I could not stop reading and had to stay up into the night and see how it all unfolded.

This is a page turner for sure and will keep your attention once the story gets going.

Book Review: 5/5 Stars

This one had me up until 2am.

Maple Clark isn’t just a teenage girl — she’s a brand. Awkward, misunderstood, and famous. Her mom manages every post, every sponsorship, every piece of content feeding 1.9 million followers. Until it all stops. Maple vanishes, and suddenly everyone who double-tapped her life is a suspect.

This is a nail-biting plunge into kidfluencer culture and the dark side of internet fame. The tension never lets up. You’re inside the comments, the DMs, the parasocial obsession, wondering which fan, hater, or family member knows where she is.

The twists are killer and earned. The characters are messy, real, and diabolically fascinating — especially Momager-of-the-year material who’d do anything for clout.

It’s more than a thriller. It’s a warning about what we consume and what we create. Addictive, timely, and impossible to put down.

This was a solid, fast-paced thriller that kept me turning the pages. The story pulled me in early, and I was invested in finding out what was really going on. There were enough twists and suspicious characters to keep me guessing, even if I was able to predict some of the ending.

The final chapters felt a little rushed, and I would have liked a bit more time for everything to unfold. Even so, the ending was satisfying, and I enjoyed the overall ride.

If you’re looking for an entertaining psychological thriller that’s easy to get caught up in, this one is definitely worth picking up.

This starts out with a fast paced suspenseful story as I was hooked from the beginning. This starts off with kid that is an influence and comes up messing. This story is told up to lead up at the beginning to look for clues to this nail biting story.
I really enjoyed reading this book as it is a first read from this author.

I was immediately hooked from the very first chapter! I may not be a parent but even to me this thriller was insane! This was a wild ride and I'm here for it! It's my first book by Liane Child and it won't be my last!!

I absolutely devoured this book! It kept me up all night reading. It was so gripping and kept me interested the entire time! I don't think I've read a book like this before. I cannot wait to recommend that we read it for my thriller book club. I will definitely be reading it again!

This book is an amazingly intricate cautionary tale about the dangers of social media and “kidfluencers”

Maple is just an ordinary girl from Utah with the most horrific stage mom, ever. There is not ONE redeeming quality in Kirsten Clark. As the story unfolds, the manipulation that this woman uses to control the narrative of the family she’s exploiting for money is insane. Lies, gaslighting and clearly valuing the likes and clout of her children. She is just evil. The book is written well, the characters are well defined and there are quite a number of plot twists that would not allow me to put the book down. This is the 2nd book that I’ve read by this author and I’ve enjoyed them both! Thanks so much to NetGalley for my advanced copy of this book!!!

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

This is my first book by Liane Child, and I had no idea what to expect.

Wow, just wow! I’m having a hard time figuring out where to start with this one.
I suppose the beginning…

The prologue starts with a bang! Maple is a 14 year old social media influencer with 1.9 million subscribers. Sounds idyllic, yet she finds herself chained to a bed shackled by her wrists and ankles.

Let’s rewind a little bit into the past now…her overbearing mother, Kirsten, has groomed Maple from birth to be an online media darling, exposing everything that Maple has ate, drank, worn, seen, etc throughout her entire childhood.

In present day, Maple’s life seems perfect. She’s gorgeous with two God fearing Mormon parents, adorable twin siblings who are also on the rise on social media, everything she could ever want (for free!), a new modeling gig which included a free trip to Vegas, and a luxurious home with a pool in the mountains of Utah.

The dark side of things quickly begin to show with Maple’s stardom: suffering from a lack of privacy, maintaining an incredibly strict work schedule, dealing with her mother who never ceases filming, being distanced from her friends, struggling with being the entire family’s sole breadwinner…

As a young teen, Maple also is bothered by the unwanted attention from grown men and the realization that AI can take innocent online images and create literally anything on the dark web.

I don’t usually comment on trigger warnings and won’t therefore go into detail, but readers beware that this one could be upsetting to some.

The story escalates about halfway through when Maple and her friend, Dylan, decide to investigate a fellow missing social media star.

Outstanding character development, short chapters with cliff hangers, multiple points of view, and shocking twists throughout make this one unputdownable.

It came off a little YA with the FMC being so young, and I feel that it could have been shorter, but I would definitely recommend it.

Also, it is a must read for any parent who has underage children heavily on social media!

Maple is 14 and a social media influencer. Beginning when she was a baby her mom, Kirsten, has made sure to document her life beginning with YouTube. Now that Maple is a teenager, Kirsten will do anything to make sure her daughter stays relevant and bringing in brand deals.

I enjoyed this one a lot, I do feel like the first half dragged at times and felt repetitive. Once the story picked up though I was hooked. This almost felt like it could have been something ripped from the headlines because of the themes of teenagers posting everything online. The twists were well done and one fully got me. But I will say, Kirsten is probably one of the worst mothers ever.

Let me just say, WOW. I was in a reading slump and I was struggling to get out. This book did the trick. It is a very fast-paced thriller that kept me glued to its pages. It also relates to this day and age with how big content creation and AI is. It is a big reminder to all the dangers out there and how easy it is to prey on vulnerable people. I really enjoyed that the different plot lines were not all happy. Sometimes certain situations do not have a happy ending. This book is definitely worth a read.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4 Stars

Thank you to NetGalley, Liane Child, and Harper 360 for a copy of Someone Just Followed You in exchange for an honest review.

NOW THIS is an influencer book I can get behind! 👏

I have read my fair share of influencer thrillers lately, and some of them are starting to feel like the same book with different character names. But Someone Just Followed You? This one actually had something to say.

Mom & Maple starts when Maple is just a child, and we watch her grow into a teenage girl with a million followers and a life that is anything but normal. Every move she makes is watched, documented, judged, and—most importantly—monetized.

Maple is caught between wanting the money, the brands, the perks, and the lifestyle that comes with being an influencer and simply wanting to be a normal teenage girl. And honestly, watching that struggle was one of my favorite parts of the book.

Then we have Kiersten.

😳😳😳

That woman was absolutely NUTS.

I understand wanting the best for your child. I understand wanting to take advantage of opportunities. I understand the money and the brands are tempting. BUT MA'AM… THAT IS YOUR DAUGHTER. The lengths Kiersten went to absolutely appalled me. At times I wanted to reach through the book and say, “Put the phone down and BE HER MOM!”

There is SO much going on in this book, and underneath the thriller aspect is a pretty eye-opening look at what happens behind the perfectly curated social-media posts. The pressure, the expectations, the constant scrutiny, and the fact that Maple's life essentially becomes a product.

Honestly, aside from some of the more obviously fictional parts, I could absolutely see this book being used as a conversation starter for parents and kids about the reality of being an influencer. What looks glamorous from the outside can be a completely different story behind the camera.

And then Liane Child decided to throw “The Man” at me toward the end.

EXCUSE ME?! 😳

That little addition had me shaking my head and realizing I had been looking at the entire story wrong. I love when an author can pull that off because I thought I had things figured out, and apparently I did NOT.

This was engaging, disturbing, thought-provoking, and actually gave me something to think about after I finished it.

Final Verdict: Finally, an influencer thriller that didn't feel like a copy-and-paste job! Someone Just Followed You had plenty of twists, some seriously questionable parenting, and a storyline that actually made me think about the darker side of social media fame.

4 stars from me! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Someone just followed you- 4⭐️

Really enjoyed this storyline, and the added bonus of making me question my use of social media. Never would have guessed the story behind the mystery man who appeared to be involved in Maples disappearance, this part of the story made me enjoy the book even more!

What a great book to open plenty of conversations about social media influencers and children. Especially as this is such a prevalent thing. The expectations of Maple and her siblings just wow.

Maple has been online basically her whole life because Kirsten, her mother, built "Mom & Maple" around her when she was still a child and then just kept going. By fourteen, Maple has nearly two million followers, sponsorships, brand deals, a modeling gig, and a family depending heavily on the money she brings in. She also has a mother who sees every private moment as possible content, which meant I spent a lot of this book wanting to physically remove Kirsten’s phone from her hand and place it in another state.

And Maple is still just a kid. She wants normal friends, normal awkward crushes, normal choices, maybe one morning where “getting ready” is not something strangers get to watch. Instead she has adults recognizing her, grown men looking at her in ways that scare her, and the creeping realization that millions of people know far more about her than she knows about them. That is such a horrifying imbalance, and the book keeps making it worse without needing to scream about it.

Then Maple and Dylan start looking into the disappearance of another young influencer, because apparently the one thing Maple’s life needed was MORE internet exposure. Their investigation takes off, people start paying attention, and suddenly Maple is attracting exactly the kind of attention nobody with 1.9 million followers should ever want. By the time Maple herself disappears, the problem is not “who knows enough about her to find her?” The problem is basically everyone.

Kirsten, though. KIRSTEN. Every time Maple expresses discomfort, fear, exhaustion, or a desire for privacy, Kirsten somehow manages to translate it into engagement strategy. She is not subtle about what matters to her, and that made reading her sections feel like watching a woman stand next to a fire alarm explaining why the lighting is great for content. The family brand has swallowed the actual family, and Maple is the product holding the whole thing up.

The "Him" chapters made everything worse in exactly the right way because suddenly all that access Maple’s family has been giving strangers does not feel abstract anymore. The creepy follower count, the AI manipulation, the deepfake angle, the fact that an innocent photo can become something else once it leaves your control, all of it starts feeling less like “internet danger” and more like, oh, these people have been leaving the front door open for years and calling it a business model.

There were a few stretches where I wanted things to move faster, especially early on when we were repeatedly seeing how trapped Maple is by the influencer machine. But once the missing-girl investigation and the unknown-man thread really started tightening around her, I stopped checking where I was in the book. I just wanted to know who had Maple, who had been watching her, and which person in her orbit was about to make everything worse.

The emotional part that got me is that Maple has spent her whole life being visible and still is not actually being seen. Millions of people know her face. Her mother knows her metrics. Brands know her reach. Almost nobody is asking what she wants.

And then the ending starts pulling the rug around in ways I did not fully see coming. I had suspects. I had theories. I was very confident in several of them. That confidence did not age well. The late reveals around the mysterious man especially made me reconsider what I thought I understood about who the danger was coming from, and I like a thriller that lets me feel smug for ten minutes before embarrassing me.

3.5 stars for "Someone Just Followed You". I had a very good time being increasingly horrified by a fourteen-year-old having the financial pressure of a middle-aged accountant, the privacy of a zoo animal, and a mother who thinks every crisis can be edited into content. It got repetitive in spots, but the social-media nightmare of it all worked on me, and I absolutely wanted answers once Maple disappeared.

Whodunity Award: For Making 1.9 Million Followers Sound Less Like Success and More Like a Suspect List

Thank you to Harper 360 and NetGalley for the ARC, and for reminding me that if a teenager ever says, “I don’t want this posted,” perhaps the correct response is not “but the engagement will be amazing.” Revolutionary parenting advice, apparently.

Thank you to Liane Child, HQ, and Netgalley for the ARC. My review is voluntary, and any opinions are my own.

Initially, this book follows 14 year old influencer Maple and her mother Kirsten. It is a crazy world of kidfluencers and some of their viewers. The author delivers a story that is both eye-opening and very scary. It's the kind of book that grabs your attention and holds onto it until the end.