The Family Friend

I would like to thank Mia from Vintage for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for fair and honest review

Publisher - Vintage

Published - 4/3

Price - £12.99 hardback £4.99 Kindle eBook

Erin lives an idyllic life by the seaside with her baby boy and handsome Australian fiancée. She's upbeat and happy - a natural mum. At least that's what her thousands of followers on Instagram think.
In the real world, Erin is struggling with anxiety and finding it difficult to connect with her screaming son. So when a famous agent offers to make her the biggest instamum out there, she's over the moon. And when Amanda, a family friend who's visiting from Australia, says she'll move in and babysit to help make it happen, it seems like the stars have finally aligned for Erin's exciting new career.

But when a devastatingly revealing video is posted online by an anonymous troll, Erin's brought crashing back to earth. As everything she's worked for starts to slip away, Erin must find out how far she can trust those closest to her.

This will be a short review explaining my reasons for DNF - a book about how people get wrapped into social media should be interesting for a blogger. Our online and actual personas are increasingly blurred and there is a danger we get wrapped too much in likes for that lovely dopamine hit. In this story we meet Erin a popular social media star juggling online life with a new family. Her world is about to implode and someone is trying to destroy her.

This unfortunately became a quick turn-off. The introduction of this novel was pure information overload and while this may have been designed to show the hurly burley of life instead it felt like a colossal piece of non stop exposition as to who everyone is rather than letting us adjust naturally to the tale; Erin’s dual life and the family dynamics . The dialogue in particular between the main characters who all either knew each other or were strangers was especially clunky. I’m never a fan of books that decide to tell you everything in one go and this just felt full of ‘things you will need to know for later’ couldn’t grab my attention and just not the right kind of thriller for me. Disappointing