If it wasn’t for some dark themes I would have thought this book was written for children. The writing is very simplistic. Everyone’s thought process is very black and white. The bad men are very bad. The influencers are all liars. The prairie is vast.

It is an odd choice to write about influencers when the author seems to hate all of them. The women influencers are all liars at best and unhinged criminals at worst. The only one that seems somewhat pleasant is a man. It is baffling that she has a podcast about them??

Lizzie has such a hard time seeing influencing as a job and understanding the pure mechanics and reality of it, it is completely unbelievable that she was once an investigative journalist or works for a woman’s magazine. For example, she sees that a company rents out space for influencers and then immediately decides that’s what they are all doing. Her friend is a liar and possible murderer because she has a neat kitchen she films in and a messy playroom she doesn’t show.

She’s very suspicious of Olivia, the agent/lawyer and only Black character for no particular reason. In fact, Olivia was the only person who gave her a full bio and was blunt with her about her job, how others felt about it, and how it worked. The book kept making her out to be shady but it just seemed like she was good at her job? And knew a restaurant where they could get dinner? She is the only person to really take Lizzie seriously and help her out but Lizzie is really negative and distrustful of her.

It does turn out Olivia does something “bad” very late in the book but there is nothing until that clunky reveal that merited how Lizzie thought about her—the interactions between them happen before the event takes place.

I kept wondering if she was named after Olivia Pope in Scandal—another Black woman “fixer”. That lines with with the level of imagination in this book.

Bizarrely, no one seems to care that six children are missing after their father dies and their mother disappears. Not the other influencers or the police.

The police don’t do the most basic bits of their job—they don’t even search half of the house. I’m no fan of the police but that seems like a really basic thing to when kids are missing and there has been a murder?!

The last two chapters recap over and over what we already knew happened and spell out what happens to every other character in a very flat way. He wrote a book. She wrote a book. She made money. She is with her kids. He left his job. She has a tv show. So many happy endings! It was a strange way to end a book where so many horrible things happened to so many characters.