Book Review: "Just Watch Me" by Lior Torenberg

This book was an all-out wild ride. Reading it was like watching a car crash—it made me wince and cringe a little bit, but I absolutely couldn’t look away. Thanks so much to Avid Reader Press for the complimentary advance copy!

Dell’s life is out of control. She’s just gotten fired from her job at a smoothie place and she’s not sure how she’s going to be able to pay her bills. To top it off, her sister Daisy has been in a coma and the hospital wants to either take her off life support or transfer her to home care. For that, she’ll need $14,000. Quickly.

With no income source except selling plants online, she decides to turn to live-streaming to raise money. Under the user name @mademoiselle_dell, she mocks, cajoles, and even begs her followers for money to help Daisy. And then she decides to start a 7-day, 24-hour livestream.

But if you want to keep your viewers engaged all that time, you have to give them content. Dell discovers—despite suffering chronic stomach pain—that she can eat hot peppers, so she encourages people to donate money for her to eat them. She becomes obsessed not only with how much money she’s raising, but also with her ranking among other streamers.

The pressure of living life online starts to get to Dell. She doesn’t really know how to sustain her followers except to get increasingly more outrageous. And as she battles online trolls and deals with frayed relationships with her mother and her next-door neighbor, it appears that Dell hasn’t been quite honest. With anyone.

The book follows one week of Dell’s live-streaming, with a section for each day. You know she’s going to have consequences to deal with, but how bad will it be? Can she save her sister? Can she eat even hotter peppers? I wanted to shake Dell more than a few times, but I couldn’t turn myself away from her story.

This book will publish 1/20.