I heard about this book quite a bit when it came out but I tend to avoid books during their hype (I’ll probably be reading Harry Potter soon and I guess I’ll continue Game of Thrones when the series is done). When I saw this book in the library, I figured that most of the hype was over and borrowed it – I’m pretty glad I did because while it’s the type of book that I normally wouldn’t enjoy, I ended up really liking it.

Social Creature follows twenty-nine-year-old Louise as she falls from her barely-making-it existence in New York city into the glamourous and exhausting life with Lavinia, a twenty-three-year-old who believes in ‘living life to the fullest’. Unfortunately, their toxic friendship quickly reaches its end (the blurb gives it away but it wasn’t a huge deal for me) and Louise is left to navigate the life that she has chosen, hence the use of the singular in the title.

Although Louise was the main character, I thought that her ‘best friend’ Lavinia was more fascinating. Lavinia reminds me of manic pixie dream girls like Holly Golightly. She puts on a supreme self-confidence facade and lives with exaggerated emotions. It’s mesmerising and exhausting and her self-centeredness is contrasted only by the fact that she is obsessed with attracting the attention of Rex, her ex (whether she loves him or thinks she loves him is another matter). By contrast, Louise’s hidden depths are almost predictable. Perhaps it’s because Louise is so much older than the people she befriends but while I found her self-destruction fascinating too, she didn’t really capture my attention like Lavinia. No wonder Louise was obsessed with Lavinia and being better than Lavinia too.

The entire story is written in the second-person present tense. Present tense is always a hit and miss with me, and I can normally only stomach second-person in short stories, but this somehow worked well. I think the second-person POV was chosen to make us feel like co-conspirators in the whole thing, but the narrator is quite clearly separate from Louise and Lavinia so I didn’t really feel like a co-conspirator. The present tense did provide a good sense of immediately and helped emphasise the breathless social-media mixed with real-life (it’s the omnichannel for socialist lives) whirl that all the characters are caught up in.

Social Creature is a book that is going to be divisive. It’s easy to hate the characters and their shallowness, to hate the style of narration, and it’s also easy to get caught up in the drama of Louise and Lavinia and find yourself enjoying the book. I fell into the latter camp for this but I can understand if you don’t. If you’re not sure if you’d like this book, I’d suggest grabbing a copy from the library or downloading a sample first.