Julie Chan is Dead is Liann Zhang’s debut novel and a recent release that I noticed on the Indigo website. I enjoy novels that satirize the society in which we live, and I did enjoy this novel for the most part, but I feel like Zhang’s message with this novel is going to be lost on those readers that could benefit from it the most.

Julie Chan is Dead is about a woman named Julie Chan who lives an unremarkable life working as a supermarket cashier and who has a twin sister who is a popular influencer. Julie and her sister, Chloe Van Huusen, were separated as young children when their parents died. Chloe was adopted by a rich white couple while Julie got stuck with their abusive aunt.

Julie and Chloe are briefly reunited when they are twenty-one years old and Chloe shows up one day at Julie’s work with a camera crew in tow, crying about reuniting with her “long lost sister”. Turns out it was all just for likes, and Julie vows to never have anything to do with her sister again, until years later when she receives a strange phone call from Chloe. Concerned when she notices that Chloe is not posting anything on social media, Julie heads to New York to make sure her sister is okay but ends up finding her sister’s dead body instead.

After being mistaken for Chloe by Chloe’s doorman and the police, Julie decides to become her dead sister and take over the life that she feels she was robbed of. And after deriding Chloe’s life as an influencer, Julie finds it remarkably easy to step into Chloe’s shoes and start influencing. Now, as much as I could understand why Julie would be tempted to leave her shitty life behind by stealing her dead sister’s life, I was not rooting for her because it seemed like prior to finding Chloe’s body it was easier for Julie to play the role of the unlucky sister than to do anything to improve her own life. And it turns out Julie just wants the attention that comes with being an influencer so she can experience that tenuous sense of belonging you get from having a lot of followers. And that is the point of Julie Chan is Dead: everyone just wants to be Insta-famous. Okay, not everyone but honestly look at how kids today are being raised by social media, and it’s no wonder they are always filming stuff with their phones to post online so they can go viral.

Julie Chan is Dead is interesting and entertaining in that it gives a reader, like me, who is not too familiar with influencing a behind the scenes look at what it is like to be an influencer through Julie’s initially critical and sharp narration. I can admit that influencers do work hard, but that is because they must always be creating new content to keep up with our lack of attention spans that has us doom-scrolling until the early hours of the morning. I briefly considered becoming an influencer (I do have four cats after all, and cats are the deities of the internet), but I am too lazy to create content 24/7. WTF kind of life is that?? If I am going to work that hard, then I want it to be for something that I would feel good about doing.

I found that Julie Chan is Dead kind of jumps the shark towards the end when Julie goes on a secret vacation with Chloe’s influencer “friends” and things start becoming literally cultish. And I was disappointed by Julie succumbing to the influencer lifestyle because I do not believe that readers who are easily manipulated by social media will be discerning enough to comprehend the criticism of influencer culture in this novel. There is also some mystery to the story surrounding Chloe’s death, but unfortunately it kind of gets lost in the narrative about influencing.