Underbelly - Anna Whitehouse

Genre: General Fiction | Womens Fiction | Adult Fiction

Release Date: Expected 5th August 2021

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

CW; This book contains descriptions Self-Harm, Domestic Abuse and Miscarriage.

Lo lives the perfect life, according to her expertly curated social media anyway. A happily middle-class Mother to a very cute four-year old, she spends her time thinking of the right instagram captions for her adoring followers, drinking very good wine and fighting for the rights of breastfeeding mums from her phone. She has no reason to know Dylan, a single mum just about getting by on a zero hour job and barely able to afford to even feed her son , just trying to continue her life quietly and out of sight.

But a chance meeting at the school entangles their lives together in ways they'd never expect - and threatens to bring everything they're hiding out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

"This one is about women and the dark things we do to each other in the underbelly of the internet. This one isn't about someone else, it's about me."

Underbelly was an exploration into the darker side of the internet and being constantly switched on and reachable - showing us two women who's lives have been changed drastically by the internet but in parallel worlds. The characters were viscerally real and grew on me slowly throughout the story, at first thinking their flaws and failings would keep me at arms length but instead showed me hidden depths to them. We saw Lo and Dyl grow as people page by page as well as how their relationship transformed from strangers to friends to something else entirely.

There's a lot of stories now that explore the phenomena of the 'Influencer' - but this one definitely stands out. Raising powerful points about parenthood, mental health, self image and the potential dangers of social media. Whitehouse masterfully showed how life can be convoluted and darker when it's being fed through millions of strangers, and just how fatal rumours can be.

A true page-turner, this was a real slow-burn that suddenly explodes into fire in ways I definitely didn't see coming. Whitehouse is definitely one to watch.

RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thank you to Anna Whitehouse, Orion Publishing and Netgalley for this ARC in return for an honest review.

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