Title: Siri, Who am I?
Author: Sam Tschida
Publisher: Quirk Books
Publication Date: Jan 12th 2021
Comment: I received a free copy from Quirk books in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are mine, as far as I can remember.
Synopsis:
When Mia wakes up in a Long Beach hospital with a head wound, she knows everything there is to know about the Kardashian-Jenner family but almost nothing about herself.
The only items in her possession are her torn party dress which immediately begs the question, what kind of girl parties on a Tuesday night? a tube of Chanel lipstick, and an iPhone with a shattered screen. She might not remember where she lives but she can use her Instagram account to work backward to piece together the basic facts of her identity.
Easy enough, right?
Instagram tells her that she lives in a Millennial-pink duplex that would make Kylie Jenner jealous. But when she arrives, she discovers a cute house-sitter named Max who tells her the house actually belongs to JP, a French billionaire and he has no idea how she’s connected to him.
After some sleuthing, she discovers she’s the owner of a high-end matchmaking service. Could JP be one of her investors? As Mia works backwards through her Instagram to figure out who she really is and find anyone who knows anything about her she discovers an ugly truth buried within her perfect social media image. Is it too late to undo her lies online and become an IRL good person?
Summary:
Mia wakes up in a Prada gown with a broken phone and no idea who she is. She seems to know everything there is to know about modern reality tv and pop culture but doesn’t even know where she lives.
Flicking through her phone she discovers that she erases all of her text messages and emails immediately so they are no clue. But her Instagram feed is full and might be the only clue she has to her previous self.
Working backwards through her pictures Mia starts to uncover pieces of her, seemingly perfect, life. But if her life was so perfect, why has no one reported her missing? Why does her ‘best friend’ refuse to answer her phone and, worst of all, who put her in hospital in the first place?
Review:
I had such high hopes for this book. An amnesiac trying to piece together their life with only clues from their social media sounds fantastic but sadly the execution just falls flat.
Mia is self-involved, narcissistic and quite unlikable. To be perfectly honest I wasn’t that surprised that no one had reported her missing.
The basic premise was that Mia deletes all of her emails and text messages as soon as she had read them so there was no trail that way for her to uncover who she was. I find that very unbelievable. I have met people who like a zero inbox for email, but I have never heard of anyone who deletes their text messages straight away. To me, it seemed like this was added just to make Instagram her only means of piecing together her life and this just didn’t sit right.
She’s supposed to be a Millennial (although I think she’s closer to a GenZ), constantly hooked to her phone and yet she doesn’t have Twitter or WattsApp or any of those other social media platforms? (If she was a true Millennial then she would have had Facebook, even an old account )She was supposed to be spearheading a high-end matchmaking service and she doesn’t even have Tinder to check out the competition?
Also, she never looks at her own photo album or takes her phone to an Apple store to try and retrieve messages? What about Maps? A Fitness tracker?
For someone so ‘on the ball’ about current culture she is strangely clueless about how to track herself.
I really didn’t care whether Mia found out about her life but I kept on reading because I did want to know about JP.
JP seemed like the perfect boyfriend and I hated how Mia was using him for his house and his money and didn’t even seem to care that she was, effectively, cheating on him with his house-sitter. He even forgave her for her felonious actions but she waved that off as almost inconsequential.
Max was pretty bland and stereotypical. A science nerd who wears geeky t-shirts, is super smart but terrible at relationships and drops everything to help a pretty girl. Other than the fact that he was black, he could have been picked right from the Big Bang Theory.
His ex-girlfriend Fay was the only smart one in the whole book, and even she was stupid enough to ruin 2 years of work in order to get petty revenge.
Mia was a con-artist, a liar, a user and had to suffer some sort of ADHD or borderline personality disorder because she felt no shame for her actions. Basically, she was a thoroughly unlikeable character.
The book itself was written quite well, there were a lot of funny lines but the sheer number of pop-culture references mean that this book is going to age quickly and be irrelevant.
The moral of the story is no one is who they say on social media and we should question the perfect lives that Instagram influencers seem to have. As much as I agree with the moral I found the actual book too bland and unrealistic.
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