BLOG TOUR | Review & Guest Post – Follow Me, Like Me by Charlotte Seager

Hello my Book Friends, It’s Thursday, nearly the weekend. Today I’m really excited to be part of the blog tour for Charlotte Seager’s latest book, Follow Me, Like Me. I finished this book yesterday, I loved it I couldn’t put it down! As part of my stop on the blog tour I’m sharing with you a mini review of the book alongside a guest post about the dangers of catfishing. It’s so interesting and kinda scary too. I really hope you enjoy it. But before that here is a little bit more about the book.

Follow Me, Like Me by Charlotte Seager
Published by Macmillan Children's Books; Main Market edition on January 23, 2020
Genres: Thriller
Amazon | Book Depository
Goodreads

When sixteen-year-old Chloe replies to a DM from a gorgeous stranger, she has no idea what she's inviting into her life. As her online fan becomes increasingly obsessive, her real life starts to come apart at the seams and Chloe realizes she needs to find a way to stop him before things spiral out of control.
Misfit Amber's online obsession with her personal trainer begins to creep into the real world. But when she hears a terrible rumor about him, she drops everything to try and prove his innocence – even if it means compromising her own.
In Follow Me, Like Me by Charlotte Seager, Amber and Chloe might find that the truth is much harder to swallow than the lies.

My Review

So as I said earlier this was a book I only finished last night. It was soooo good as well. At first I thought it was going to be a contemporary YA novel based on the dangers of social media. But it turned into something sinister and thrilling, it was a book I couldn’t put down.

We follow two girls, Chloe and Amber – they couldn’t be anymore different. Chloe is outgoing, popular, attention-seeking both on social media and IRL. She becomes the victim instead, she starts talking to a guy on Instagram and everything spirals out of control. She get’s ghosted and suspended from school and her whole life gets turned upside down and she wants to know who. Amber is shy, known as the ‘weird girl’ at school, sits at the back of the class and no-one knows who she is. She sort of likes it that way, but deep down she wants to have a connection with someone. Instead she starts stalking a guy, Ren who helped her in the gym. She wants to prove his innocence from being sacked from his job for molesting and stalking girls.

Both Chloe and Amber get sucked into that bubble, in different way. One stalked, one was stalking. For me I really liked Chloe’s character and probably her story more. She got stripped back to her core, and I always love morals where we find who the character truly is. I found Amber’s slightly cringy and awkward at times, but if you think about it, it’s fits her character perfectly to make a reader fell like that.

It’s this gravity that social media has on us. We are constantly in its orbit. But people will suffer from it, day in day out. This is why I also love this book because it breaks down and bursts that social media bubble. See how dark it can be and it might not even be your vault, it’s about being aware too. We forget the dangers of it. It sends shivers down you spine just thinking about it. But I also remember that when I’m working with young people, sometimes they just see it as a part of them, it’s their life, their reputation, when really they have their real life to live too. Just like Chloe and Amber.

I loved Charlotte Seager writing, it’s thought-provoking, thrilling, mystery that you can’t put down. It’s quick, easy read that I hope a lot of you will pick up. As a reader I would highly recommend to any of those who has read SweetFreak by Sophie McKenzie.

Thank you to MyKindaBook for providing a copy in exchange for an honest review. 

Guest Post 

The Dangers of Catfishing for Teens

Everyone has an online persona. Whether it’s a more polished version of yourself, someone funnier, better looking or more well liked. Many people try to be authentic online, but the very act of posting something about yourself requires you to curate a profile. Something that at its heart is not quite you.

So we’re all guilty of embellishing a little on social media. But taken to its extreme, catfishing is when these profiles are deliberately fictional and used to elicit information or a relationship with someone else.

In my new novel Follow Me, Like Me one of the protagonists Amber harbours an obsession with a boy from the gym, which causes her to pretend to be someone else in a bid to find out more about him.

The second protagonist, Chloe, also befriends someone online who doesn’t appear to be quite who he seems.

On both sides, this behaviour can be problematic. Creating fake profiles can easily feed an obsession and encourage loneliness, while befriending someone online you don’t know in real life can leave you open to be exploited – or even put in real danger if you agree to meet them without truly knowing who they are.

Ultimately catfishing has changed since anonymous chat-rooms in the early days of the internet. Teens are much wiser at picking up on cues about when things aren’t quite right. But catfishers have also become more sophisticated. Ghosting email addresses, photoshopping fake screenshots of conversations or images, location sharing and fake websites are now all too easy to set up.

The key to social media is to have a degree of scepticism. In the same way you wouldn’t believe the image of an airbushed magazine model – we all need to be a bit more critical of the things we see online.

So whether you’re online persona is prettier, more popular … or a completely different person – remember that the people you’re looking at could be even less real than you think.