Social Creature
Ratings16
Average rating3
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand I found it a very absorbing and credible story about two “social creatures” in NY in 2015. Unvarnished and un-sensational–not easy to do. I went back to it eagerly and enjoyed it. On the other hand, it built to a sense of a revelatory ending, and then went in an entirely different direction. I would give it 3.5 stars if I could, but the accomplishment outweighs my misgivings about the ending. Kudos to Tara Isabella Burton.
I love a chaotic/toxic female friendship with a deeply flawed protagonist. This is exactly what I wanted and I enjoyed it immensely. Not necessarily super realistic, but definitely a wild ride.
Do you ever feel like you have a love-hate relationship with a book? Well, I did feel that with this one.
I can't explain how I feel about this book. It has a very interesting message, it's weird (which I love, btw), the plot is quite intriguing, it had potential. But on the other hand, it was underdeveloped. Something was off. I felt like it could be so much more but it wasn't.
This would be a great beach read. Filled with glamorous, substance addicted, self destructive rich people spending too much money and behaving shockingly. This is narrated by an outsider who becomes friends with the monsterous Lavinia. It makes a good point about the nefarious uses of social media. A page turning thriller filled with some suitably unpleasant characters.
I'm obviously in the minority with this rating but I absolutely hated this book.
First, when you compare something to The Talented Mr Ripley, you're basically giving away the plot from the get-go. For readers like me, who loved that book, it might not make a difference because we'll read it anyway, but then you need to write a book that stands up to the original. Unfortunately, for me, this one was not successful in that regard.
Louise, the “Ripley” character in this book, is not only obnoxiously unlikable but isn't at all sympathetic. She leaves home for unknown reasons and refuses to go back for unknown reasons, so she does whatever is necessary to stay in NYC, despite seeming to hate her life there. She meets Lavinia, a spoiled rich girl who seems to have endless amounts of money and no adult supervision or responsibilities. Fine - that's easy enough to believe. All of the characters, however, seem to live in this pseudo-Gastsby-esque world of drugs, drinking, and parties without any explanation as to why they are doing what they do. There's no motivation given for these characters, just their endless whirl of parties and operas and new dresses and expensive drinks. Everyone says they hate their parents but no reason is given for hating their parents. Everyone says they hate their friends but no reason is given for hating their friends. As a reader you're forced to take everything at face value but it's hard to do when you don't trust any of them and you hate all of them. At the end I found myself not caring much about what happened to anyone. Live...die...move to California and live on a commune...I did not care one whit.
The writing style made it difficult to read as well. It was a slowly paced book that consisted almost entirely of one drug-fueled outing after another (again, think Gatsby here), but with nothing interesting happening or substantive character development occurring in between, so the book dragged on endlessly. However, the narrative was almost entirely Louise's thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness form and it was frenzied in style, with endless run on sentences and abrupt changes in topic. It was just a deeply uncomfortable book to read without a clear reason to be that way. It took too much work and didn't feel worth it in the end.
The only interesting thing happening in this book is the author's use of social media to keep the plot moving, but in the end it wasn't enough to rescue this book from itself. It was an ambitious novel that just fell short for me.
(Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.)