[ad/gifted - I received a copy of this book for the purpose of this review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]
Title & Author: Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg
My rating: 4/5
Publisher: Scribner
Publication date: 26th February 2026
Blurb:
Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her bathroom-less studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual, spiking stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plant propagations to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise $14,000 for a week of private life support for Daisy.
In the dungeon of her stream, Dell is in control, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms of engagement and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. On a dare, she discovers that she has a talent for eating spicy food, and her streaming fame explodes as her pepper consumption graduates from jalapeño to habanero to ghost. Finally, Dell is good at something―but as her behavior becomes riskier and riskier and a troll-turned-incel threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.
Review:
I love weird girl fiction and as soon as I saw that this was recommended for fans of Big Swiss, I knew this was a book for me.
Our main character Dell is unlikable but I love that and it worked so well for this story. After being fired from her low wage job at a juice bar, she discovers that money can be made from livestreaming. She is aiming to raise $14,000 to cover the private medical bills of keeping her younger sister on life support.
She streams for a week straight and quickly learns that people will pay to see her do strange things such as eat five habanero peppers or set her arm on fire. Soon, the livestream view count races up, Dell can't quite keep track of her viewers now but she recognises the ones who have been there from the start. But she made a mistake at the beginning of the stream and one viewer delves a little deeper into Dell's real life.
I loved the writing style and how the urgency comes across, especially within the Carolina Reaper eating challenge that Dell takes part in. I am only touching on the basics of the novel, it does run much deeper but I feel like you should go in blind.
The author described it as for people who are chronically online, about the joys of being watched but the terror of being truly seen and that's just perfect.
I can't wait to read more from this author.
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