Review by Booklist Review
Life presented on social media isn't always what it seems. De Vigan's (The Loyalties, 2020) captivating novel follows one family trapped in its virtual guise. Mélanie Diore is mother to six-year-old Kimmy and eight-year-old Sammy and runs the family's immensely popular YouTube channel, Happy Recess. Prominently featuring the young children, Happy Recess has amassed millions of followers and is so successful it has become the Diore family's main source of income. When Kimmy goes missing, the Paris Crime Squad is called, with steely police officer Clara assigned to the case. As Clara delves into the investigation, she struggles to understand the norms and obsessions of the world Mélanie inhabits. For her part, Mélanie has amassed her fair share of detractors during her rise to vlogger stardom, with allegations that she is exploiting her children. After the family receives confirmation that Kimmy has been kidnapped, the race to find her is made more complex when long-held secrets from Mélanie's past are brought to light. Blending suspense and social commentary, de Vigan's tale offers various perspectives on social media and its constructs of reality.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The search for a kidnapped child reveals the truth behind her curated onscreen image. As a child growing up in the French countryside just after the turn of the 21st century, Mélanie Claux finds the only thing that can soothe the empty feeling inside her is watching television, particularly Loft Story, France's first foray into reality TV. Raised in an emotionally abusive household, Mélanie moves to Paris at the first opportunity. There she attempts to break into the reality television world as a contestant and, when that fails, languishes working at a travel agency until she marries Bruno Diore and has two children, Sammy and Kimmy, who, while beguiling, do nothing to fill the void that is the most central tenet of Mélanie's life. That is, until Mélanie begins to orchestrate little scenes for the children to enact and uploads the resulting videos to her family YouTube channel. Happy Recess becomes a viral hit, logging several million views per video and earning millions of euros for the family in endorsement contracts and advertising deals, an outcome that seems fair compensation for the near 24-hour visibility the children must endure to keep the channel running. Meanwhile, Clara Roussel grew up in Paris, the daughter of political activists who stormed the filming location of Loft Story in an attempt to free the contestants from their Big Brother--style surveillance. Unlike Mélanie, Clara was raised with care and integrity and brings those values with her into her career as an officer with the Paris Crime Squad. The two women's lives are thrust together when Kimmy is kidnapped and Clara is called in to investigate. As the kidnapper's demands become more bizarre and the list of suspects lengthens to include practically anyone watching the Happy Recess channel, both women must reckon with the ramifications of living in a world where the most banal details of family life can be packaged and monetized and where the value of human existence is adjudicated not by the actions of the individual but by the reactions of the masses. An intelligent and affecting look at the void that lurks inside our social media fantasies of domestic bliss. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
