Blog Tour, Book Reviews

All the Lonely People by David Owen | Book Review & Blog Tour

Item: All the Lonely People
Rating: 5
Author: Jenniely

Hello friends! Today I’m with you kicking off the Blog Tour for All the Lonely People by David Owen, and I’m so excited. I really enjoyed this book and it really took me by surprise! I don’t really read much of a synopsis before I read a book so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

For the tour we were asked to answer a question, which really made me dig deep.

How has the internet made your life better and how has it made it worse?

Wow. What a question? Let’s start with the easy one, how has it made my life better? I’ve made a TON of friends online, found communities, whether it be to do with books or other things in the past. It’s always made my life better in that respect, coming from a small welsh village I didn’t have many real life friends for a while.

It also makes you feel less alone in your problems. There is always someone else who has what you have, so you can find someone to relate to you.

How has it made it worse? Well gee. I think social media really impacts mental health negatively. It’s so easy to compare yourself to others and forget that what they’re showing online is just their polished successes. When I was younger I also used to get into a lot of drama and I hated that. There are more things that I don’t particularly want to go into but yeah.

This review, as always, will be spoiler free.

All the Lonely People by David Owen
Published by Atom on January 10th 2019
Genres: Young Adult
Pages: 320
Goodreads

Everyone tells Kat that her online personality - confident, funny, opinionated - isn't her true self. Kat knows otherwise. The internet is her only way to cope with a bad day, chat with friends who get all her references, make someone laugh. But when she becomes the target of an alt-right trolling campaign, she feels she has no option but to Escape, Quit, Disappear.

With her social media shut down, her website erased, her entire online identity void, Kat feels she has cut away her very core: without her virtual self, who is she?

She brought it on herself. Or so Wesley keeps telling himself as he dismantles Kat's world from across the classroom. It's different, seeing one of his victims in real life and not inside a computer screen - but he's in too far to back out now.

As soon as Kat disappears online, her physical body begins to fade and while everybody else forgets that she exists, Wesley realises he is the only one left who remembers her. Overcome by remorse for what he has done, Wesley resolves to stop her disappearing completely. It might just be the only way to save himself.

All the Lonely People is a timely story about online culture - both good and bad - that explores the experience of loneliness in a connected world, and the power of kindness and empathy over hatred.

All the Lonely People really blew me away and made me think. It had queer rep and explored issues that really make you wonder about the world that we live in. Online bullying is something that is far too prevalent these days and it’s something that needs to be addressed more.

I think a lot of us readers will see ourselves in Kat. A lot of us struggle socially, or have done at some point in our lives, and I for one have WAY more friends online than I do in real life (I mean I think that’s true for a lot of us). So it’s easy to put yourself in Kat’s shoes, which makes this story all the more hard hitting. When she’s attacked by an alt-right online campaign… it kinda of made me nauseous, in a good way? Can you be nauseous in a good way? I mean in the way that, it was written so well and addressed something that real people go through. It’s sickening to be reminded that people deal with this, but also it’s not something that we should bury our heads in the sand about.

All the Lonely People alternates between Kat’s and Wesley’s POV. I really enjoyed reading both of their perspectives. Us readers we are also expected to suspend disbelief with the idea of the ‘fade’, which added a really interesting take to this story. It really brought these issues to the forefront of our attention and really addressed a lot of the issues youth today are having to deal with. It made for a very interesting and entertaining read.

We learn a lot about these characters throughout the story, and they both grow a lot. We are with them when they discover themselves, what kind of people they really want to be as well as their sexuality. There are also a few side characters and though we don’t get in depth info on them, we learn enough about them for them to be well developed.

I don’t want to go into much detail because I really don’t want to spoil it for you guys, you really just need to read it!