Title: #famous
Author: Jilly Gagnon
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Publication Date: February, 2017
If a teenage girl tells you that she’s never taken a “stalker” picture of a cute guy in a mall before, she’s probably lying. Rachel in #famous by Jilly Gagnon knows this all too well. When she takes a picture of the adorable guy in her Creative Writing class, Kyle, who’s working at the food court, to send to her best friend, she figures it’ll be harmless, and no one will ever see it. She’s never been more wrong. Kyle’s picture, along with Rachel’s sassy hashtag, instantly goes viral, and by the time Kyle gets off work and gets home, his mom has gotten a call from a popular talk show that wants to interview Kyle. Despite Rachel’s hopes to avoid the mess she created on social media, the producers of the show want her and Kyle to do a special segment together, and soon Rachel finds herself falling in love with someone in one of the most public ways possible.
I definitely enjoyed this book, and it was cute in an overly-cheesy way. Some parts of it I found slightly unrealistic for high schoolers, but nevertheless it makes a fun read. The pacing is fantastic, and before I knew it I was a few hundred pages in and the story was moving right along. I love Jilly Gagnon’s writing style, and I can say that I’ve never read a book with a pretense quite like this one. I also love how the author took the modern-day occurrence of becoming insta-famous over a small social media post and brought it to life in a love story, it’s something I’ve never thought of before. I really liked her use of social media in the book, even though it took me way too long to figure out which platform she was trying to replicate, and I greatly appreciate the way she showed the double-standards that people have on social media when it comes to girls versus boys, and who’s popular and who’s not.
I would recommend this book for teens 14+ and give it 8/10 stars.
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