If you’ve been listening to the chug chug chug of the PR train for Lottie Moggach’s Kiss Me First but haven’t had a chance to ride it yet (sorry not too sure where on earth the steam train analogy has come from but let’s roll with it), then I AM HERE TO HELP.
A while back I reviewed Kiss Me First and The Silent Wife by A.S.A Harrison for Stylist magazine’s Book Wars feature. I liked The Silent Wife’s Gone-Girl-esque marriage war, but Kiss Me First definitely made the biggest impression on me, and the subject matter feels much more original and current. It follows Leila, a lonely tech geek who turns to the internet for companionship after the death of her terminally ill mother. She stumbles across an online thought forum and ends up embroiled in a project to help Tess, a glamorous but unstable woman, end her life without upsetting her friends and family. The plan? To keep in touch with Tess’ nearest and dearest via Facebook, email, and pre-recorded voicemails.
As Leila spends time with Tess, studying her every ‘x’ in every email and every LIKE-inducing comment on Facebook, it made me think of the sheer amount of personal information we’re all buffeting out into cyberspace every day. Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series contained an episode where the bereaved could ‘connect’ with their dead loved ones via an instant messager and phone service that trawled through the deceased’s emails, tweets and phone calls to perfectly recreate their ‘voice’ and persona. With more and more networks and services cataloguing over every move and thought (this blog included), if you start thinking about it too much you can’t help put get a bit Spiderman about the whole thing (‘with great power comes great responsibilityyyy’).
As Leila starts to blur her own identity with Tess’, the reader is left wondering where on earth her twisted story will end up. I’ll admit that I would have liked a bit of a darker ending, but I LOVED the quietly sociopathic narrator. Not sure what that says about me…
So if you would like to win a lovely big hardback copy of Kiss Me First and have the chance to read about the mentalness of social networking protocol firsthand, all you have to do is tweet “I’ve just entered a competition to win #kissmefirst on https://proseandconsbookclub.wordpress.com” (or something to that effect) @frillseeking and leave a post below. A randomly selected winner will be chosen early next week. Good Luck!
PS UK addresses only please!
proseandconsbookclub.wordpress.com 