Friday 14 August 2015

Book Review - #PleaseRetweet by Emily Benet - #HIReadathon

Amazon UK
Title: #PleaseRetweet
Author: Emily Benet
Format reviewed: Ebook
Source: Netgalley
Publisher: Harper Impulse
Publication Date: 27th August 2015
Rating: 5 Stars


Social media whizz kid, May Sparks has landed her dream job. Well, not quite, but the salary is great and all May has to do is handle the online profiles of Z C – list celebrities who have the tendency to say inappropriate things. Easy, right? #wrong

May’s clients include an ex big brother star (who she's definitely not going to sleep with #neversaynever), a disgraced TV presenter (who wants May to sort out his marriage as well as his Twitter account), and a woman who once flashed her boobs on X-factor. They're all relying on her to turn them into stars. But they're not going to make her job easy.

As May is sucked further and further into her job she begins to lose her grip on real life. Her friends don’t ‘like’ her Facebook posts anymore and even her gorgeous neighbour, who once seemed to be on the same wavelength, criticises her career choice. Worse, May’s clients start getting trolled by an annoying tweep, who May happens to agree with.

Then May’s secret online identity is leaked, causing her to start trending on Twitter. It looks like the status update is over. Unless May can leave the superficial social media word behind and find her own voice again…

Since I can't resist new shiny books, I am going to read #PleaseRetweet by @EmilyBenet next for #HIReadathon 

@EmilyBenet The first tweet of this book has made me snigger in recognition!

@EmilyBenet About 3 pages further on and I'm smiling and sniggering again. I have a feeling this is going to be great!

Just finished the prologue of #PleaseRetweet by @EmilyBenet and I'm laughing and smiling along with it. 
#bookbloggers its on Netgalley now!

The above are my first impressions as I started to read #PleaseRetweet. Although I do interact regularly with authors on twitter, I don't normally tweet four times in 10 mins just about the prologue of a book I have just started. This should give you some idea how much I enjoyed just the start of this book. 

And my enjoyment didn't end there. I kept up that level of laughing and smiling, and engagement with the story the entire way through. I found that #PleaseRetweet has perhaps made me think I may be just "slightly" addicted to social media, but unlike May in the story, I am at least not trying to be 5 different people at the same time. 

May Sparks is fabulous with social media, her personal twitter account has around 7k followers, and she is now working in a job where all she has to do is be on social media all day. However due to the new Platinum package her company is offering, she is essentially ghost writing 4 C-List Celebrities twitter accounts, all in their voices, but to stop them from doing anything else to destroy their profile. 

She is addicted to her phone and tablet, and is continually refreshing all accounts to see what the current responses to her words are. When she isn't doing that she is thinking about what she could take photos of, or tweet for them, and to some extent she even starts thinking in #hashtags.

May is so obsessed with work, that her friends start having a problem with her, as does her flatmate, and May doesn't even recognise a man who could be interested in her, instead trying to matchmake him, so that she is left alone with her phone.

Over my lunch break, I had been reading more of this book, and came across May's school style grading system to gauge reaction to the tweets she sends. And then an hour later the above occurred, so I just had to send a tweet! 

@EmilyBenet Just had a RT from an egg profile pic, and instantly thought of the twitter grading curve in #PleaseRetweet

The celebrities May is pretending to be on twitter range from the ex big brother contestant who had to leave the house after a rather embarrassingly placed injury, an X-Factor audition failure, who ended up flashing the judges and reckons her breasts will get her fame, an author who is trying to sell more books and get back his wife, after he cheater and also a young songwriter who is perfectly happy not to be on twitter at all, until his publicist gets involved. 

Between getting involved in their dramas, some of which are hilarious, to May starting to feel like she may be dealing with more than she can cope with, and her increasingly strained relationships with anyone in her personal life, you have a remarkably entertaining and fabulous book. 

I would recommend #PleaseRetweet to anyone who loves social media, anyone who loves celebrities (especially their rises and falls to fame), and to anyone who is just looking for a fantastically fun book. #PleaseRetweet  is one of my most enjoyed books this year. 

Thank you so much to Harper Impulse and Netgalley for this review copy. This was my honest opinion. 

2 comments:

  1. Great review, I downloaded this from Netgalley and can't wait to read it!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think you will enjoy this, once you start it.

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