You Will Never Be Me by Jesse Q. Sutanto, and Talking to Strangers by Fiona Barton: Sunday Salon

 

You Will Never Be Me by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Publication: August 20, 2024; Berkley

Genre: women's fiction, thriller, suspense, adult contemporary fiction

I love Jesse Q. Sutanto's books, from her romantic comedies to her newest books, contemporary thrillers.

In You Will Never Be Me, two best friends, Meredith and Ashley, get into social influencing, and though one helped the other to gain followers at the beginning, both soon become fierce competitors, always comparing the number of followers they gain. They both need the money from their social media work, as Ashley's husband makes a meager salary, and Meredith is a single mom.

I liked the plot direction that takes the reader on a roller coaster ride between the two former friends, and how one sabotages the other. I also think the book is a spoof on the abnormal lengths social influencers will go to get fame and fortune through their followers. The book also shows the negatives to this kind of lifestyle, when it becomes extreme, and how it could affect families and readers alike.

The suspense becomes more intense as Meredith and Ashley compete fiercely, and after one too many sabotages, one of them disappears. At the end, I found myself rooting for one of them. This is fiction, after all, a mystery thriller, but one with a unique way of bringing a message about influencers and social media.

See also, a Kdrama, Celebrity, a thriller with a similar story of murderous influencers. 

My next read 

I've read The Widow and The Child and gave them high ratings, so I'm eager to get into the author's latest mystery thriller, Talking to Strangers, to be published August 15, 2024 by Berkley. 

Description: 

When the body of forty-four-year-old Karen Simmons is found abandoned in remote woodland, journalist Kiki Nunn is determined this will be the big break she so desperately needs...

While the police appear to be focusing on local suspects, Kiki sets out to write the definitive piece on one woman's fatal search for love. But she will soon learn that the search for truth can be just as deadly...

What are you reading this week? 

Memes: The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, and Sunday Salon, Stacking the Shelves, Mailbox Monday

Review: Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

Talking to Strangers

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell, September 10, 2019, Allen Lane. Personal copy. 

INTRODUCTION"Step out of the car!"

In July 2015 a young African American woman named Sandra Bland drove from her hometown of Chicago to a little town an hour west of Houston, Texas. She was interviewing for a job at Prairie View A&M University, the school she had graduated from a few years before. She was tall and striking with a personality to match....

The chapter goes on to describe the verbal exchange between Sandra and a Texas police officer who had pulled her over for failing to signal a lane change. The end result is that upstanding, educated, and blameless Sandra was arrested, handcuffed and thrown into jail. Three days later, she took her own life in prison.

And so begins this book, Talking to Strangers, by Malcolm Gladwell, on strangers meeting and the misunderstandings and false assumptions that can sometimes result in  tragic outcomes. 

Misreading strangers can lead to a guilty Bernie Madoff being trusted by duped investors, to an innocent Amanda Knox being incarcerated for years and tried for a crime for which she was later exonerated. Spies high up in government have been misread by the CIA and trusted with secrets the spies regularly leaked to a foreign power. And it goes on...

A fascinating book that I read cover to cover in just a few days, intrigued by the facts the author presented to make his case. People are not as transparent as they may seem to us. They may be something completely different.

Most people will give suspicious people the benefit of the doubt, which is good for society to run smoothly, in general, but which can be disastrous when their judgment is wrong. This is part of Gladwell's conclusions on this topic, and just a part of what the book has to say about how we interact with and interpret the actions and behavior of a variety of strangers. 

Page 57:

The next three chapters of Talking to Strangers are devoted to the ideas of a psychologist named Tim Levine, who has thought as much about the problem of why we are deceived by strangers as anyone in social science.... 

The book is persuasive, well researched, and thought-provoking. It will make you think twice or three times about the validity of your initial reaction to a stranger, positive or negative, whoever they may be.

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader