Fake Authors, Fake Dating, and a Real Celebrity Book Club
Plus, what she actually wants for Valentine's Day
Forgive me if we’re a little scattered this week, but I have a cold and my brain isn’t up to a coherent theme. I’m being kept alive by orange juice and the new Ali Hazelwood book, Deep End, which was so good all I wanted to do after I finished was re read some of her other books (Love Theoretically and Check and Mate are my particular favorites). I think an Ali Hazelwood book is particularly comforting when you have a cold, since her heroes are often so focused on caretaking (in their own ways). Yes, I would like a man to make me eat a sandwich right about now. Coming from the world of fanfiction , Ali has really mastered the art of the hurt/comfort fic. And don’t just take my word for it - here are a few reviews from BookTok:
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A man who texts back, romance.
And now for a round up of many weird and interesting things I’ve seen on TikTok and Twitter lately:
Misdirected
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This was a good reading week for me (#blessed) - aside from Deep End, I finished the upcoming Taylor Jenkins Reid book, Atmosphere (in my opinion, her best ever, even if parts of it left me so stressed I wanted to vomit) and Lucy Parker’s new Audible Original, Misdirected, released on Tuesday. She’s been one of my favorite authors for so long that I was excited about Misdirected, but I didn’t anticipate the small controversy that would arise upon its release (but the Twitter algorithm predicted it would be of interest to me). Misdirected is, like most Lucy Parker books, a behind the scenes story about the relationship between two co-stars on a Bridgerton-style TV series. After four seasons, FMC Hattie’s character is set to fall in love with the series’ villain and her on-set nemesis, Anthony. Will sparks fly? (Yes). Backstage romances can be banal, but for me Parker excels at including the kinds of details that make these stories compelling. Misdirected is narrated by Gwilym Lee and Nicola Coughlin, star of Derry Girls and the most recent season of Bridgerton. Smart casting.
Except…
There is a very loud contingent of Bridgerton fans who ship Nicola Coughlin with her co-star, Luke Newton. On Tuesday morning, my timeline was flooded with disbelief from fans who think Nicola’s choice to narrate this audiobook was some kind of implicit confirmation of their relationship.
I hesitate to call this conspiratorial thinking, but in this new age of the internet, it feels like everything is fraught and fit to be mined for potential hidden messages. I hope Lucy Parker is, at least, selling a lot of books and gaining a lot of new fans, but the response to her writing seems to be based solely on possible connections to Nicola and Luke’s real life interactions. Some fans have even speculated that Lucy Parker is a fake name (please do one Google!). Just a weird situation all around.
Girls Don’t Want Flowers
BookTok trends, Valentine’s Day edition: girls don’t want flowers, they want books.
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Then there’s this:
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This video is older, but an enduring BookTok trend is jokes about spending your money on books instead of essentials. This makes sense in light of the proliferation of special editions and shelfie culture. Books as gifts are so back.
Cry with Me
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🚨Trend alert 🚨 - videos of creators crying over the ending of tearjerker books. The above video commits the cardinal (to me) BookTok sin of not sharing which book inspired this reaction, but my feed is flooded with the tears of emotionally devastated readers. People want to feel something! Most common books that evoke this reaction: The Nightingale, Tuesdays with Morrie, The Things We Leave Unfinished, and so many others.
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And I haven’t even touched on the male BookTok model who is asking people to pay $70/month to watch him read Penelope Douglas’s The Devil’s Night series (apparently she called her lawyers and issued a cease and desist).
Fake Dating
Ever since the micro TikTok ban, the primary ads I’ve been getting on my feed have been for weird dating apps I’ve never heard of - mostly Duet and Hily. The ads are pretty nondescript and the only differentiator for the apps seems to be that they claim to validate if the people on them are real. Except guess what? A quick reddit search to read about people’s experiences with them indicates that they are mostly full of fake profiles and charge lots of money to participate. As a single millennial woman fed up with Hinge, I understand the urge for new apps. But this definitely isn’t it.
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OF COURSE it uses the BookTok theme song, That’s So True by Gracie Abrams.
Imaginary Celebrity Book Club
I didn’t see this one coming, but is Katherine Heigl a BookTok girlie now?
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She’s gotten really into Nisha J. Tuli’s Artefacts of Ouranos series - a sort of mid tier popular romantasy series. I think a lot of people envision romantasy readers as women in their early twenties, but Katherine Heigl is a good demographic representation of just how broadly appealing these books are with women readers. Is this an adaptation play, or does she just really love Nisha J. Tuli? I guess we’ll see.
Let me know the last book that made you ugly cry, or if TikTok is also serving you ads for dating apps no one has ever heard of. xoxo
The last book that made me cry was The remains of the day and it made me cry in such a way that it made me wonder if perhaps I had never *really* cried before and even though I have "cried" since reading that book...no...no I haven't. Not really.
DEEP END was so good!!