Girlcrush: The #1 Sunday Times Bestseller

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There are parts of this book that were so ridiculous that it made me angry (why had she never heard of an INCEL? A self-professed feminist, Given went viral in 2018 for starting a petition to cancel the “fat-shaming” (and just terrible) Netflix series Insatiable.

you can't enter into a genuine good-faith dialogue about a text which is written off the back of a vapid instagram brand rather than any sort of literary merit or drive to tell a story. The long-awaited second instalment in Samantha Shannon's Sunday Times and New York Times-bestselling series Tunuva Melim is a sister of the Priory. The storyline became repetitive and boring and I ended up completely skipping the last 40 pages because I couldn’t be bothered with Eartha and her flapping about. They didn't even need to come out as gay or non-binary because "the way they would recline into chairs with their legs wide open did that for them".It’s completely out of proportion and in reality, if anyone posted a sloppy drunken video being like “I hate men, I think I’m gay”, it would just be scrolled past.

For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. The queer topics and situations felt realistic and proved an interesting read, but it became clunky and rushed after the first 200 pages. It was almost like two books in one: the first book describing Eartha’s sexual awakening as a bisexual woman, breaking the cycle of abusive relationships in her family; while the second narrative focuses on her journey on social media and the perils of the internet.

To be fair, I think it’s really hard to get any kind of literature about social media or cancel culture tonally right (and I’d credit Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This and Porpentine’s longform essay Hot Allostatic Load as the only examples that I think truly work). If you follow florence online, it just sounds like a fictional version of her life and friends and experiences - maybe it was a cathartic exercise for FG. This author has tried to do something pretty wonderful; use their voice to promote feminism, queerness, bisexuality and show us that social media is detrimental to our health and well-being… and that the world is still controlled by men. I find myself wishing Girlcrush had lived up to its title a bit more, focused more on Eartha’s flings with girls, dug deeper into her first sapphic love, maybe allowed her some heartbreak offline and taught her that women can also be awful human beings. In a world where nearly everyone is ‘plugged in’ to Wonderland, seeing something different – raw and unfiltered hits home for many.