Earlier this year I realised that most of the books on my TBR are serious in tone and/or topic, and I needed more fun reads to intersperse in-between. So when I had a day out with a friend in Bath and popped into Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, this paperback jumped out at me with its bright shiny red lips on the cover.

Girlcrush by Florence Given is a near-future novel about friendship, relationships, identity, social media and celebrity. And it’s very fun and easy to read while still being genuinely good.

It’s 2030 in a fictional British city and Eartha, an artist, has just realised that her long-term boyfriend is a cheating asshole and that she is bisexual. She makes a messy, drunk confessional video and posts it on Wonderland, the social app that everyone is plugged into obsessively, and it goes viral.

With the help of her best friend Rose (non-binary cafe owner and queer guru) she begins to discover queer sex and dating. At the same time, Eartha is becoming a professional influencer and it quickly becomes too much. The online and offline Eartha are diverging, she is overwhelmed with adoration and abuse, and it isn’t clear who she can trust.

This is a frank, funny novel that deals with more serious themes than you might expect from that set-up. It explores depression, multiple forms of abuse and assault. I was glad to see that it specifically addresses biphobia. After photos are uploaded to Wonderland of Eartha kissing a man in a nightclub, she is subjected to a torrent of abuse calling her fake and a liar who doesn’t belong in queer spaces.

“How have I been declared both too gay and not gay enough in the space of a minute? I feel like I’m not enough for gay women or straight men. So where do I belong?”

The extent to which the book’s characters – who are almost all young people, in their 20s – are constantly plugged into Wonderland and form their views of people and the world on there, is a little extreme but honestly doesn’t feel that far into the realm of science fiction.

I was slightly disappointed by which aspects of the story are resolved in the end and which are left unaddressed, but overall I really liked this.

Published 2022 by Octopus Publishing.

Source: Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath.