This is not my usual read but I still enjoyed it, especially the style of writing and the unique concept.

A pitch black exploration of the overwhelming, suffocating 'too-much-all-of-the-time' internet age, in which a person's reality and online persona can be so different it's hard to feel like anybody is ever completely real anymore. It also looks at the 'privileged' condition of being a certain kind of well off white person - ultimately well-intentioned and , but jaded and powerless and - let's face it - lazy in the face of overwhelming injustices that we can't do anything about.

This is a very polarising book and I can see why. The writing is dry and cynical, but I thought it ultimately was the only tone that could have carried this book. It doesn't really leave the reader feeling any kind of powerful feeling - but that's the point. This book is like the worst rabbit holes of the internet, it sucks you in and leaves you feeling stupid and exposed, but unable to change anything.

Personally I think it's a really smart piece of craft and a good, strong read, and I'd recommend it.

The start of the book was thrilling and had me obsessed but mid-way through (around the 40%) mark it started to fall flat for me. I liked the overall concept of finding out your partner is a conspiracy theorist etc but it lacked the thril.

DNF

My first ever DNF. Sometimes it feels as though there is an obligation to finish a book, having gotten this far, but you get to a point where you admit you’re looking forward to reading something else. I tried so hard to stick with it, I downloaded the audiobook to see if that would help, but it didn’t, it just dragged it out more.

The description of the book appealed to me but I soon realised that after the first chapter, the plot was abandoned and it never picked back up and changed course completely.

The protagonist spends time in Berlin but again, the story doesn’t get anywhere. I skipped to the last page just to see how it could end because I only got to page 140 and there is a plot twist, but again, I’m so glad I gave up when I did because the extra 160 pages were not worth it.

I really wanted to like this book but found it very hard to get into it and stay engaged. There are parts that captured my attention briefly but overall not a great book.

I was almost excited to read such novel with this so current and curious plot, as if it were the manifesto of the millennial generation; but I must admit that it disappointed me. “Fake Accounts” is surely an A brilliant and original insight on the digital world, already omnipresent in our daily life, which the strengths of this book, and where all the creative forces focused on, the best explicated and resolved, but beyond this, nothing else remains. The story doesn’t really unfolds in a real plot, it’s more like a very long stream of stream of consciousness about American society during the Trump era, women's condition and desires (through I lens that I don’t see as feminist honestly), the fakery reality of social medias that heavily influence human relationships, among which the one between our narrator and Felix, the admin of a conspiracy accounts; topics that weren’t been very well executed, so the novel is reduced to a sterile and colourless voice.
The most interesting part (the one about Felix’s fake account) was dismissed in few pages, losing its narrative core and the story derailed in a long stream of consciousness of a white too-American woman from New York. And I say too-American because, although I read books of authors from around the world, this the first time I felt a deep cultural distance from the narrator/the author and me. I may have been too much Italian for this novel – or I may be too much young for this one.
“Fake Accounts” is a good attempt to make a reflection on the digital worlds and its implication in human relationships, which unfortunately got lost in a colourless writing style and in a stream of consciousness that annihilate the external voices. Despite this, the novel has its potential.

Thanks to NegGalley and 4th Estate to have given me the opportunity to read this novel in exchange for a honest review.

Following a fascinating beginning - this book kicks off with the narrator discovering that her boyfriend has a double life as a a social media troll - this book then takes us to Berlin and the beginning of their relationship. The portrayal of young Americans in Europe is clever and engaging but I found the narrative slowed down after that and the skewering of the permanently online culture could be a little sharper. A worthwhile read though

I really wanted to like this book but found it very hard to get into. The story is hard to explain without giving a spoiler so I won't but its a book that I really struggled to finish. There are parts that captured my attention briefly but overall not a great book.

I found this really over-written, as though the exposition was a series of clever Notes app vignettes that the author was determined to shoehorn into a longer narrative. For example all the stuff about skin care regimens in the opening chapter was utterly unconnected to the events of the story and made me feel irritated when it was so developed as to seem relevant but later turned out to be …well, nothing.
Interesting premise but it didn’t lead anywhere I wanted to be.

This is definitely a Marmite book and I fell on the side of enjoying it, but I didn't quite love it - despite being the person it is essentially pitched at, as an Extremely Online millennial woman. I enjoyed the stream of consciousness style and there were a lot of points that I chuckled and related to but I don't think it said anything strikingly original. Still, an interesting novel from a talented writer.

So strange, but a unique concept and well-executed. A bit uncanny to read, but definitely recommend for fans of anything that sits in that literary space of weirdness.

I love these "Very Online" novels, capturing a very specific moment in Internet culture, and working out different ways of what we see a novel as being. Fake Accounts is experimental and will definitely split opinion, but it does a great job of offering a snapshot of experience.

I can see why this novel wont be for everyone, the stream of consciousness style writing definitely needs some getting used to. However I adore novels that push the limits and are experimental, I thought this one was fab and read it very quickly over 2 sittings.

Unfortunately writing style wasn't for me. If you like stream of consciousness, give it a go. I found it very hard to get in.

It took me a while to get round to this but what an addictive read!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me access an advance copy of this book in exchange for my feedback.

Unfortunately this was a really difficult book for me to persist with. Although it was less than 300 pages, the stream of conscious style of writing did not engage with me and did not encourage me to try and persist, although I did eventually finish after picking it up a few times.

At first the plot appears intriguing, a woman finds a message on her boyfriends phone and discovers that he is a member of an anonymous conspiracy group. During the current period of "Fake news" and "bots" seemingly everywhere on social media, this book couldn't have been written in a better time. However the potential that the narrative could have had in exploring the lines between myth and reality just falls short. Instead, realising that nothing she believes in anymore can be considered truth, our narrator decides to move to Berlin and seems to engage in a lot of self sabotaging behaviour. The initial plot of discovering this online world is completely abandoned.

One positive I have is that this book definitely opened the conversation around whether you should put aside political views for love, however this book could have done so much more to explore this.

This is a clever, playful novel full of wry humour which will appeal to those who enjoy ironic, post-modern writing.

I was drawn to the premise of this novel, which involves the narrator discovering that her boyfriend, Felix, is an online conspiracy theorist. This happens within the opening pages, and Oyler creates interest through the narrator's reaction to this discovery: rather than simply being shocked, she is rather delighted by the moral highground this revelation allows her to inhabit, and decides to keep this knowledge secret for a while. She enjoys following Felix's posts even while they are together, and pondering how best to break up with him.

This was probably the section of the novel I enjoyed the most, and it was quite short. From here, Oyler pivots first to telling the backstory of how the narrator and Felix met, in Berlin, and then describes a series of events which lead the narrator to return to Berlin, alone, in order to undergo some process of self-discovery, though her precise aims remain somewhat ill-defined. The narrator's time in Berlin occupies by far the longest section of the novel, a section given the title "Middle: (Nothing Happens)". Among other things, the narrator describes a series of online dates in which she adopts various invented personae, and her prolonged attempts to secure a visa.

There is a lot of humour in the novel, much of it coming from the arch, rather detached voice of the narrator, who admits that she is "teetering on the border between likable and loathsome". She also has fun at the expense of the growing trend for novels to be written in short, aphoristic fragments (such as Jenny Offill's 'Weather' or Patricia Lockwood's 'No One Is Talking About This') by first critiquing this style before pastiching it for some 40 pages, mocking her own writing as she does so. I enjoyed the formal audacity of this section, and some lines were laugh-out-loud funny.

Oyler also writes very perceptively about contemporary discourse and how this is affected by online communication, which, she seems to argue, is often performative or wilfully reductive (in her work as a blogger, the narrator is required to "appeal to a youngish audience that assumed it was smarter than it was, that wanted seemingly complicated arguments that confirmed to its associative ideas about the world, but delivered simply".) Thus, it is perhaps not just Felix, but all of us, who are giving "fake accounts" of ourselves.

I found this argument compelling, and much of the novel highly entertaining, but I still would have liked more interrogation of Felix's actions and motives; I found the somewhat elliptic ending a little too abrupt and unsatisfying. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this novel as a satire on our post-truth, post-ironic world.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me a digital copy of this novel to review.

I'm sad to say that I couldn't finish this book. The writing was excellent and some of the sentences were brilliantly constructed, but I just couldn't quite bring myself to care enough about what happened to the characters. As an example of technical craft though it is superb.

Fake Accounts reminded me why I don't bother with social media. Two people who don't really care about each other are a couple. She discovers that he has a secret online presence that actually makes him less interesting.
Because she has nothing better to do, our unnamed narrator moves to Berlin and wastes more of her life online. I wanted to give her a good shake and plead with her to get on with her life.

I was really hyped to read this debut novel by Lauren Oyler, who I know has a huge following as a journalist and critic. The novel begins in January 2017, on the weekend of Donald Trump's inauguration and the Women's March, when the main character decides to look through her secretive boyfriend's phone and discovers that he runs a popular, anonymous conspiracy theory account on Instagram, despite telling her for years he wasn't on social media. She is confused and outraged, and decides to go to the march and think the relationship over, before another shock stops her plans dead.

This is a witty, insightful and intelligent novel about presentation of the self in a very online society, about personal and performative politics and about writing itself. I'll admit I would have preferred a faster paced novel, as some of Oyler's experimentation with the genre of millennial women's semi autobiographical fiction was too extended and disrupted my enjoyment of the book but I was interested throughout in the narrator's voice. It is narrated in the first person, but to an audience, as if at a one-woman show, where she preempts reactions from various people in her life and speaks to the reader about how they are progressing through the novel. This voice is charming and clever, but is quite obviously also eager to impress and defensive, and reminded me at times of the way in which Fleabag from Phoebe Waller Bridge's live performance and later tv show at first cheekily winks at the audience and lets them in on her jokes, but in times of stress isn't able to keep up the pretence of the airy, cool young woman she wants us to see.

Fake Accounts is also interesting in that it came out around the same time as Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This and Roisin Kiberd's The Disconnect, and shows a preoccupation with the possibility of an enduring selfhood in the face of the all consuming nature of an increasingly online world. Fake Accounts is out now from 4th Estate, thank you netgalley for the copy!

I really wanted to love this, but I really didn't.

The promised plot sounded fantastic, but it failed to appear in the book itself. The central character discovers that her boyfriend has secretly been running a popular Instagram account focused on sharing conspiracy theories and fake news, leaving her questioning the realities of their relationship and her perception of him. Described as a "seductive" and "subversive" analysis of identity and our online personas, this felt more like 272 pages of unstructured, narcissistic rambling.

The "series of bizarre twists" promised on the jacket were nowhere to be found, and the entire pacing of the plot felt drawn-out and lacked depth. It was a struggle to get to the end, and when I did it just felt flat. Disappointing, really!