Review: Underbelly by Anna Whitehouse
This wonderfully striking cover is definitely what drew me in to this book and I’ve seen it doing the rounds of social media very recently, so it’s probably already on your radar. I was very excited about it after reading the synopsis but I couldn’t help wanting a little bit more.
Lo is a successful influencer who regularly gets lucrative paid advertising deals with brands that cater to her audience of almost 40,000 women. Dylan is a struggling single mother barely scraping by on her telesales job. On their first day of school, Lo’s daughter Scout and Dylan’s son Noah form a firm friendship, forcing their mothers to meet and enter each other’s worlds.
Lois’ Instagram is very open and honest about everything that she goes through. Her audience are privy to almost every little detail of her life and although we see how much her posts help women going through similar things, Lois’ story is somewhat of a cautionary tale about the dangers of being so frank online. It leaves her wide open to trolls and when she does inevitably put a foot wrong, they descend immediately.
Dylan is running from her abusive ex and trying to give Noah a life away from the chaos he was born into. She has a horrific past and she releases her pain into her blog. Dylan’s traumas have made her wise to many things and she has an instant distrust of men, which is understandable. To be honest, she is reluctant to open up to anyone and I was surprised when she only seemed to need a few glasses of wine to open up to Lois, who she had previously been wary of. Their friendship appeared to progress a little too quickly for adult women, particularly when one of them is quite clearly keen to be left alone.
Lois is a woman that I’m sure we all know. She is a typical extrovert who thrives around other people and having a ‘project’ to work towards. As the narrative progresses and Lo discovers that Dylan is a talented writer, Dylan almost becomes Lo’s ‘influencer protegee’. Although Dylan is fully on board with it, I was a little confused as to why these two grown women seemed to be unaware of the pitfalls of being internet-famous. Despite knowing that Dylan is a private person, Lo doesn’t warn her friend of the life-changing power that having thousands of followers brings. In turn, although Dylan does briefly worry about her violent ex finding them online, it’s apparently not enough of a deterrent to keep her from going along with it. Perhaps Lo is so deeply entrenched in the magic of social media that she genuinely doesn’t consider the dark side of it and perhaps Dylan really is naive enough to believe that she is unlikely to be found. I find it a little hard to believe in 2021, but perhaps this is the case!
Of course, the book does deal with the dark ‘underbelly’ of the internet who are always waiting for the biggest influencers to make a misstep. I was constantly waiting for a twist to reveal itself and the identity of these women, who are clearly close to Lois, to come to light. But it never did. I was getting towards the end of the book and I was scouring the pages looking for even a subtle clue that gave me answers but I didn’t find anything! Usually I don’t mind things not being completely spelled out for me because there are normally enough clues for me to come to my own conclusions but there was virtually nothing here, unfortunately.
Underbelly is a very well-written book with two fairly interesting protagonists but I think it may have tried to be two different things -an adult contemporary commentating on social media and a thriller- and didn’t quite execute the thriller part. It really could have done with a few more chapters because Lo and Dylan’s friendship was very under-developed. They only really spent time together two or three times, so I’m not even really sure they had a proper friendship. The storyline with Dylan’s ex seemed to wrap itself up a little too nicely and was slightly insulting to Dylan actually. There was some tension towards the end but it immediately all fell away when I realised that I wasn’t going to get a proper resolution. So, I had lots of issues with it but it does shed light on different faces of motherhood and exposes the vulnerability of seemingly untouchable influencers.
