Title: Such Lovely SkinAuthor: Tatiana Schlote-Bonne
First Published: September 17, 2024
Publisher: Page Street YA
Pages: 304
Genre: Horror, Supernatural, Young Adult
Format: Ebook
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Rating:
Synopsis:
Viv isn’t known for telling the truth, but she’s not lying about having an evil doppelganger.
After spending the summer wracked with guilt about causing the accident that killed her little sister, ambitious gamer and chronic liar Viv returns to Twitch streaming. She never told her parents the truth about the accident, but she hopes that maybe making it big in streaming and giving the money to them is penance enough for her mistakes.
The weekend before school starts, Viv finds the perfect horror game to make her Twitch comeback, and during an offline practice run, an NPC asks Viv for a secret. She decides to tell them the truth about her sister’s death since a game could never share her secret—in doing so, she accidentally welcomes a demonic mimic into her life.
No one believes Viv when she tells them about her evil doppelganger. Viv has lied to get her best friend’s sympathy and has spread rumors for attention, so why should anyone trust her now? The only person who believes her is Ash, a cute social outcast whom Viv once bullied. In trying to clear her name and kill the mimic, Viv discovers that her lies have hurt people who never deserved it, herself included.
Get the Book: AmazonReview
Such Lovely Skin is a fast paced and thrilling little book about a teenaged Twitch streamer that finds herself haunted by demonic doppelgänger. Tensions are kept high in this book from start to finish and it is genuinely creepy. I love the digital horror aspects of this book.
Unfortunately, I ended up feeling only lukewarm by the end of the book. There were times where I thought, maybe Viv can stand to learn something here, and I would have loved if there was a little more character development in her story. A cry wolf character that goes through a harrowing ordeal and learns absolutely nothing from her behavior. I know that not every story has to instill a moral and not every main character has to be likeable, but Viv causes real suffering and isn’t really sorry about it. Viv has a genuine problem with social media addiction that I felt could have been better addressed as well, a missed opportunity.
Despite my criticisms, Such Lovely Skin is an impressively written debut novel that will appeal to it’s target audience. It is acutely aware of the modern online gaming space and the popularity of streaming as a choice career for Gen Z. As a lifelong gamer and parent to Gen Z and Gen Alpha gamers, I appreciated that gaming livestreams was so accurately represented in this book.
Quote
“Maybe I’ll even buy them a new house, something really nice, something that will make up for all the pain I caused them. If I’m a top streamer, then maybe I can be worthy of getting to live my life while Riley rots in the ground.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Tatiana Schlote-Bonne
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne is a Japanese American writer, weightlifter, and gamer. She has an MFA in creative writing from The Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Such Lovely Skin is her first novel.
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