Welcome to my review of Idol by Louise O’Neill. I saw this one on NetGalley months ago but have only gotten around to reading it just in time for its release today! I don’t know why I’ve put it off for so long because I loved it. It’s a fascinating, compelling read I just couldn’t put down.
‘Follow your heart and speak your truth.’
For Samantha Miller’s young fans – her ‘girls’ – she’s everything they want to be. She’s an oracle, telling them how to live their lives, how to be happy, how to find and honour their ‘truth’.
And her career is booming: she’s just hit three million followers, her new book Chaste has gone straight to the top of the bestseller lists and she’s appearing at sell-out events.
Determined to speak her truth and bare all to her adoring fans, she’s written an essay about her sexual awakening as a teenager, with her female best friend, Lisa. She’s never told a soul but now she’s telling the world. The essay goes viral.
But then – years since they last spoke – Lisa gets in touch to say that she doesn’t remember it that way at all. Her memory of that night is far darker. It’s Sam’s word against Lisa’s – so who gets to tell the story? Whose ‘truth’ is really a lie?
‘You put yourself on that pedestal, Samantha. You only have yourself to blame.’
Riveting, compulsive and bold, IDOL interrogates our relationship with our heroes and explores the world of online influencers, asking how well we can ever really know those whose carefully curated profiles we follow online. And it asks us to consider how two memories of the same event can differ, and how effortlessly we choose which stories to believe.
Louise O’Neill grew up in Clonakilty, a small town in West Cork, Ireland. Her first novel, Only Ever Yours, was released in 2014 and won the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, the Eilís Dillon Award for a First Book and the Bookseller‘s inaugural YA Book Prize. Her second novel, Asking For It, was published in September 2015 to widespread critical acclaim. It spent 52 consecutive weeks in the Irish top 10 bestseller list. Both novels have been optioned for screen.
Louise’s first novel for adults, Almost Love, was published in 2018, followed shortly by The Surface Breaks, her feminist re-imagining of The Little Mermaid. Her second novel for adults, After the Silence, was published in 2020 and was an instant bestseller in Ireland. It won Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and has also been optioned for screen. Idol is her third adult novel.
Louise contributes regularly to Irish TV and radio, and has a weekly column in the Irish Sunday Times.
We start by meeting our protagonist, Samantha Miller, a hugely successful social media lifestyle guru. She is at the top of her game and has just published another book, one in a line of successful bestsellers. In addition, she has a wildly successful business empire built off the back of her recreating herself after her sexual assault and addiction issues.
Fresh off the press is an essay she opened describing her formative sexual relationship with her best friend. The essay went viral (obviously!), and now her manager has received an email from her best friend giving a very different view of the encounter.
Samantha visits her old friend and begins to crumble. With everything at stake, what will happen and what will become of Samantha and whose account is the truth or is there more than one truth?
This book explores memory and truth, how we sometimes see things in different ways to others and the consequences of that. For example, if you tell a lie enough times, you begin to believe it as the truth, but who has done this?
Idol also explores the life of social media influencers and the new cancel culture. Do we expect these influencers to be perfect, placing unrealistic expectations on them or are we right to hold them to a higher standard? They are influential to so many, after all. Finally, idol explores trial by social media and what happens to those behind the lens.
The plot is brilliant. I enjoyed exploring these topics and how they came to be in the public domain and shape the way forward. We watch Samantha change as she becomes a mess. She is flawed, manipulative, and completely caught up in herself, the version she presents to the world in any case.
The characters are flawed, imperfect and not wholly likeable. I didn’t fall in love with any of them, but they were compelling to read and held my attention well. They were well developed, and I felt I knew their past well by the end. I found Sam most unlikeable, but she is realistically portrayed and the perfect example of those who grow up and completely change their own backstory to suit their needs. She is determined to succeed above all else and changes her narrative to suit her situation, and will stop at nothing to gain success, even selling her own story to her many followers.
This was a fascinating read; it makes you stop and think about what is happening around you. Who is who they purport to be and who has changed their narrative to become something they weren’t previously? We all have hidden, secret sides to our personalities that we don’t want to share, but some are darker than others.
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| Title | Idol |
| Author | Louise O’Neill |
| Series | N/A |
| Format | eARC |
| Page Count | 320 Pages |
| Genre | Literary Fiction |
| Publisher | Bantam Press |
| Release Date | 12th May 2022 |
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