This is a suspenseful read that looks at the culture of being an influencer. A slow building story line with not particularly likable characters, nevertheless I had to read to the end
.My thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for allowing me to read an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I thought I’d made a mistake when I was approved to read this on NetGalley. I’d requested it based on the cover photo, the fact that I’d seen it popping up on Book Twitter, and the authors name appealed to me! I read the first two pages and still thought I’d made a mistake, and then I COULDN’T STOP READING!! This book is like literary crack!
Emmy, the main character, is one of those outwardly lovely people, who beneath that veneer doesn’t really seem to care about anybody else. I even wondered at one point if she particularly liked her children or husband. Her husband seems long-suffering, backed in to a corner, having to put up with his wife being an Influencer on Instagram and ruling their lives based on the photos she must take, the places she must go to, and the companies she must appease. After all, she’s the main breadwinner in the family. He hasn’t managed to finish his second book after the success of the first. And then there’s another voice in the story.

At first this stalker seems only mildly threatening (like there’s a rating!), but as the book progresses and the stalker tells us more of their story, she begins to become more menacing.

Now, I post book reviews on Instagram more as a personal record. The likes and feedback are a bonus, and I get especially giddy if one of my favourite reviewers or, god forbid, the author, comments on what I’ve written! But to have millions of followers and millions of pounds depending on my content - it’s something that sounds far too stressful! This world was utterly fascinating to me. And the last 30% or so of the book is just devastating (I’m warning you!). This is well worth a read: I’d most definitely recommend this book - and I’m so glad that I chose this book by it’s cover!

Many thanks to the publishers, Mantle/ Pan Macmillan, for giving me access to a copy of this book on NetGalley.

The blurb:THE INFLUENCER
I need to be liked. It’s my job

My personal brand is built on honesty.
Family, friendship, cheering other mothers on when things get tough.
Doing it together - telling it like it really is – that’s what @the_Mamabare is all about.

THE HUSBAND
I just want a quiet life

Her adoring followers feel like they understand my wife.
My wife certainly understands them.
I know she is beautiful, smart, ambitious, charming.
But she’s also a liar.

THE FOLLOWER
I want revenge

The filter's about to drop.
I’ve been watching you and your family very closely.
You've ruined my life.
Now I'm going to ruin yours.

The characters were quite unlikeable but I still enjoyed the book. The instagram "star" as exactly as you would expect full of her own self importance but I was shocked by how every action was carefully orchestrated nothing was as it seemed. . As the story progresses we learn that not everyone is an adoring fan.......
I didn't guess the ending which is always great. I would like to thank Netgalley, Harper Books and the authors for giving me an early copy of 'People Like Her'

People like her is a suspenseful read that looks at the culture of being an influencer, specifically on Instagram. Our main character Emmy puts a false version of her life online, though not the usual perspective. She isn’t struggling with motherhood, but to appeal to the masses she pretending she is. She makes her house a mess in order to take Instagram shots, as the rest of the time everywhere is clean and tidy. This story looks into the ridiculous extreme of living your life on social media and the immediate dangers of doing so and the creeps that can use your account for negative reasons.

The tension in this book is built wonderfully. I found myself biting my nails, especially towards the end. This is a multiple perspective novel, and it’s safe to say that none of the people behind the perspectives are likeable. Though when children are involved like in this book, it’s difficult not to get invested in the safety of the family all the same.

I highly recommend giving this book a try, it’s worth noting that this can be a difficult read at times though so content warnings for miscarriage, loss of a child, death of a baby and possibly more that I’m missing related to children and babies wellness.

Thoroughly enjoyed despising the main character, especially considering 2020/2021 has highlighted a nation disgust towards the self interested and selfish outlook of many Instagram “influencers”. Time they met their downfall! I loved the insight at the start and then the snappy development of the dark and twisty thriller storyline! Looking forwards to reading more from Ellery!

Emmy Jackson is an "InstaMum". She posts her family life on Instagram and has over a million followers, is branded to the nines, and believes in telling it like it is. People like her, love her, slavishly following everything she posts.

Married to Dan, with a daughter, Coco, and baby son, Bear, Emmy's legion of fans hang on her every word. Dan, though, knows one thing that they don't. Emmy Jackson is a liar. Her posts are manufactured, her image micro-managed by her agent, Irene.

Someone has a big grudge against Emmy. This person wants to hurt Emmy and her family, believing Emmy has ruined their life. They meticulously plan their revenge. Emmy hasn't a clue. Until it is almost too late.

The fake sideshow that is Emmy's social media life would have been funny, except there are two small children involved. Emmy is self-obsessed, always wanting to milk the last drop of sympathy or cuteness from one of her posts, videos or media appearances, even betraying her oldest and best friend along the way.

You may end up thinking that Emmy deserves everything she gets. At the same time, you may even feel slightly sorry for the woman who hates her so much.

There is a twist at the end, but even that wasn't altogether a surprise.

The story is well written and portrays the world Emmy inhabits convincingly, but just doesn't grab me enough to make me want to read it again. If you like celebrity culture, you will probably love it. I don't and didn't.

I was sent an advance review copy of this book by Pan Macmillan, in return for an honest appraisal.

People Like Her follows successful 'Instamum' Emmy, her husband Dan and their obsessed, revenge-driven stalker. The book presents a really fascinating take on the notion of influencers, and how dangerous it can be to share too much with the world, especially when that involves young children. It also shed away some of the façade to reveal how much of what goes online is fake!
Even during the opening section of the book, before anything overtly sinister happens, there is a dark tone, and a definite sense of foreboding. It takes a while to get to, and there are multiple dead ends along the way, but the ending few scenes are terrifying and really unsettling. However, I would have liked to see more come from the various subplots and events that kind of fade away - Winter's character for example, as well as what happens with Polly.
None of the main characters are particularly likeable, although this didn't bother me too much; it just meant that I wasn't completely engrossed in the story as I didn't really care one way or the other how the story would unfold. Overall this is an entertaining story with a subplot about the dangers of the internet, but as a truly engaging and mesmerising thriller, it fell a little short for me.

This book takes a look at how social media influences people - we follow Elly Jackson, aka "MamaBare" the popular influencer who is very "real" and "down to earth" in her parenting/lifestyle posts.
Elly is playing the game - she knows what sort of posts get the views & the views bring the monetary rewards!
Husband Dan, reluctant "PapaBare", is a struggling author who shuns the limelight & is not entirely happy having his children (Coco & Bear) splashed across social media.
I almost forgot that this book was a thriller as this aspect of the story is slow to build, though there is a darkness there throughout. I wasn't keen on the final part of storyline, or the slightly incomplete ending, but overall I liked the topic of this book - the way that reality & fantasy are so blurred for so many people & the dark side of fame. I liked Dan as a character, Elly was likeable at times but at other times she was thoroughly horrible (eg the way she treated her old friend Polly). I felt sorry for Coco who was too young to know better yet was starting to rebel against being the "perfect child" in photoshoots with Mama - I have to say that I disliked Winter from the moment she appeared in the story!

Overall, this is an unusual book, which does make you think about the influence of social media

Disclosure: I received an advance reader copy of this book free via NetGalley. Whilst thanks go to the publisher for the opportunity to read it, all opinions are my own.
#PeopleLikeHer #NetGalley @ellerylloyd_author @ElleryLloyd @MantleBooks

Our Sunday lunch was very late today as I literally couldn’t put this book down - especially the last 1/3rd. It appears to be a simple story where you think Oh I know where this is going but it twists and turns right until the end. It’s also an insight into modern day social media and has wider implications than a lot of people realise. I didn’t particularly like Emmey the main character, but I don’t think that’s important. This book is well written, well researched and a good read.

First I cringed & then I yucked & then I yiked. "Influencer" is a dirty word at the moment in the UK with all those bints that have decided to travel to Dubai in the middle of a pandemic so I was already going into this with a bad taste in my mouth.

People Like Her is about Emmy, a mummy blogger with over a million instagram followers, Dan, her washed-up author husband and Emmy's insta stalker. Part thriller, part social media exposé but also mostly boring, being gross and mawkish in equal measure. I'm not going to lie, if I'd seen the American cover of this book I never would have picked it up - I really do think the UK cover evokes the idea of a different kind of book entirely.

It did however get me thinking about the ethicality of mummy/family influencers. There's no way small children can begin to understand and consent to their early lives being shared with thousands of strangers on the internet. At no point, especially when follower counts reach tens of thousands, can you know the intentions of every single person that follows your posts either. Food for thought!

The irony isn't lost on me, sharing my review on instagram though, especially with thanks to Pan Macmillan for sending me a copy to review! (Ha)

‘People Like her’ by Ellery Lloyd sounded like such an intriguing read. In this social media age a story that focuses on the potential pitfalls and dark side of our internet obsession has to be worth taking a look, right?

Emmy Jackson is ‘Mamabare’, an Instamum with a million followers. Priding herself on her honest representation of parenthood and what being a ‘Mama’ in this day and age is really like. As the money and freebies roll in so does her follower count, meaning her life is under more scrutiny than ever and her ‘fans’ needs ever more demanding. Behind the scenes her personal relationships are strained, her dreams of TV stardom are fading and unbeknownst to anyone shes being stalked by someone hell bent on revenge. Someone who thinks that ‘someone like her’ needs to understand the power and devastation her words can cause.

I thought this book was really though provoking in its premise. It did a great job of showing the social media celebrity from both sides. It was interesting to think about the ‘hard work’ involved in presenting these ‘organic’ profiles to the world. Also the faith and reliance ‘normal’ people have in internet famous people to validate their choices. It interested me that being an Instamum was Emmy’s job and source of family income so therefore her choices weren’t as free and easy as they might appear. This gave me a certain understanding into why she may have sacrificed her family’s privacy and potentially made choices that, from an outsider’s perspective, were unimaginable. I like how I moved from feeling the ‘bad guy’ was Emmy…then it was the stalker…then the agent….and so on. Nothing is as simple as it seems I guess and requires us to ask ourselves ‘are we sure we know what choices we’d make in the same situation’? The writing style was great and I flowed nicely. I was invested in the story and the characters and read the whole book in one sitting. For all these reasons, I would recommend having a read of this book.

People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd
Thanks @netgalley @panmacmillan
And @ellerylloyd_author for my arc
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Pure jumping on the bandwagon here but I'm agreeing with the hype. This book is amazing and real and pretty terryfying. Loved it. Highly recommended xx
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Wow. What a read.

This is a real roller coaster about the dark side of social media. Completely engrossing with final twists you really don’t see coming. It’s such a compelling read. While you may think you are being careful about what you put on social media does anyone really think about how fragile the world that influencers inhabit is. A really stunning read which gives you an insight into the reality behind those perfectly formed squares. A real 5 star read. Highly recommended.

People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd is a very disturbing story about the use of influencers in social media and how what they say and how they use their influence to change peoples behaviour for good or bad and mainly for their own personal gain. This is the story of Emmy and her family, Dan, her husband, Coco, her daughter and Bear, her new born son and how the family dynamics are changed and altered by the mother using her influence to maintain the family’s high standard of life by being a social media, influencer for a career and way of life.
How that whole life is threatened when Emmy and Bear are kidnapped and drugged, in order that Emmy may see for herself how damaging her advice can be and how it can destroy another family’s when it is given thoughtlessly and has serious consequences.
It is an interesting and disturbing storyline, with many intriguing characters who change the dynamics of the storyline throughout. There are many twists and turns and an awesome ending!
Highly recommended

People Like Her is both an interesting look into the world of social media influencer and a decent thriller. Emmy is a top-tier mumstagram minor celebrity and as the story progresses you get a deeper look behind the trivial and bland social media personality and find out what she's really like. This disconnect between her online persona and her real-life creates most of the conflict in the story and leads to a page-turning finish.

I mostly enjoyed reading this book and found it interesting to read a story that addresses the way social media is affecting our lives and how influencers have sprung up and now are part of popular culture.

The thriller aspects of the story are very slow to build and at times it's closer to a long essay about influencer culture and the perils of the internet. I did find myself pulled in towards the end though and was keen to keep reading to find out how it would all play out. The ending involved a dramatic and unlikely change of heart from one of the key characters which I found a little bit unbelievable but otherwise it was a satisfying conclusion.

I'd recommend this book to anyone that's concerned about the impact of social media and likes domestic thrillers.

A book for the age. An Instagram influencer and her family. The dynamics, the expectations, the lies and half truths, the trolls. A wonderful narrative of what we see in those social feeds only give a glimpse in the life of the person controlling the narrative. The business side and how people blame others for their actions.
An explosive ending that is totally unexpected.

Oh dear. I really wanted to love this book, but it just fell flat.

It starts with what I considered to be an unnecessary prologue, it doesn't really add anything TO the story. Even more frustrating is that there is a story from the past which is necessary to the plot that could have been inserted as a prologue (or part of it) - it would have created a lot more suspense.

The "thrill" of this book doesn't really start until 75% through at best. There are so many red herring plot points that just fall flat. There's whole chunk of a side plot point that could have been removed and you wouldn't really have noticed. The writing is poor but this might be to do with the ARC and maybe (hopefully) some more editing was to be done.

While I can deal with, and often enjoy, books with unlikeable main characters...I usually need something more than how awful the two main characters in this book are...or for some sort of lasting consequence to happen.

I should have DNF-ed it, but I kept hoping for something to happen - and it was so short I was sure that something would happen soon...but there kept being scene after scene of nothingness, things that added nothing to the plot. When everything started to wrap up and at one point in the epilogue I was hopeful that it would do something to end on a high note and save everything...but no. I was just really let down by this, I was expecting something like Ingrid Goes West but instead of trying to befriend the influencer being more sinister...but this wasn't that. It just felt quite disconnected....thinking about it makes me annoyed and that's me already having distanced myself from it.

I really enjoyed this book.
I'm not one for insta stars and all that rubbish but this thriller was so good that I couldn't put it down!

‘Followed by millions, hunted by one..’ cover tag line.

My thanks to Pan Macmillan/Mantle for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘People Like Her’ by Ellery Lloyd in exchange for an honest review.

Emmy Jackson had been a fashion editor for a glossy British magazine, though with the changes in the industry along with motherhood she has left the fashion shows behind to become an Instamum with over a million followers and a number of lucrative sponsorships. Yet in actuality her online persona of Mamabare has been carefully crafted in order to appeal to her target audience.

So Emmy dresses down and artfully stages photoshoots to emphasise how much she is struggling with being the mother of three-year old Chloe and infant son, Bear. Her posts are cutesy though anything but spontaneous.

Her husband, Dan, prefers the quiet life but currently they are heavily relying on Emmy’s income from her Instagram activities. He was a trust fund kid, who had some success with his first novel. Yet now the fund is running low and he is struggling to write his second book.

Unknown to either of them they are being stalked by someone who blames Emmy for ruining her life. Eep! Chapters move between Emmy and Dan with the occasional input from the stalker - who is getting closer and closer and is clearly very much a danger.

This was a cracker of a domestic noir from Ellery Lloyd, which is the pen name of the London-based husband-and-wife writing team of Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos. It focuses on the highly competitive world of the mega-influencers. Even though my involvement in Instagram is minimal, I am aware of how powerful some influencers have become.

There does seem to be an element of restrained satire within the narrative, exposing the cynicism and artifice behind the influencers along with the cut-throat competitiveness where one misstep can lead to being someone being ‘cancelled’. I found it a bit melodramatic at times though this suited the plot.

Aside from a gripping story, its authors also raise questions about the fickleness of social media, which has become such a part of 21st Century life, as well as the potential vulnerabilities associated with it.

I enjoyed it very much and zoomed through it very quickly.

Instamum Emmy has thousands of parents following her relatable social media pages where she shows the struggles of modern parenthood for her and her husband Dan, a novelist who has been struggling for years with his second novel. But Emmy and Dan’s reality is very different to that portrayed on Instagram and someone wants to hold Emmy accountable for pain she has caused....

This is a compulsive suspense novel with an interesting premise which examines the lives of influencers, both real and virtual. Emmy’s increasingly questionable parenting decisions which seem to lean more towards what will get her more engagement on her pages, rather than what is best for the children, start to drive a wedge between her and Dan. Neither Emmy nor Dan are particularly likeable but Emmy’s almost ruthless pursuit of success is compelling and the mystery of exactly what she has done to earn the hatred of the unidentified POV character keep the reader turning the pages.