You can’t put a filter on reality.

Bree Bozeman isn’t exactly pursuing the life of her dreams. Then again, she isn’t too sure what those dreams are. After dropping out of college, she’s living a pretty chill life in the surf community of Pacific Beach, San Diego…if “chill” means delivering food as a GrubGetter, and if it means “uneventful”.

But when Bree starts a new Instagram account — @breebythesea — one of her posts gets a signal boost from none other than wildly popular self-help guru Demi DiPalma, owner of a lifestyle brand empire. Suddenly, Bree just might be a rising star in the world of Instagram influencing. Is this the direction her life has been lacking? It’s not a career choice she’d ever seriously considered, but maybe it’s a sign from the universe. After all, Demi’s the real deal… right?

Everything is lining up for Bree: life goals, career, and even a blossoming romance with the chiseled guy next door, surf star Trey Cantu. But things are about to go sideways fast, and even the perfect filter’s not gonna fix it. Instagram might be free, but when your life looks flawless on camera, what’s the cost?

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

I could almost hear the squeak and clank of wheels turning in her head as she tried to piece together the solution to this problem.

Everyone always talked about finding your passion as if it was this evasive creature you had to smoke out of a burrow. They also seemed to operate under the assumption that everyone had a passion to find. But I had long since accepted the sad reality that I was born passionless.

“Did you Google me?” He looked horrified, as if I’d admitted to hacking his email or rifling through his underwear drawer.

My Review:

The main character in this story was a hot mess.   Bree was barely eking by and subsisting on ramen and protein bars while living in a hovel at the intersection of denial and procrastination and begrudgingly relied on her older sister Natasha to constantly bail her out. Bree annoyed me and in no small measure, and while Natasha was her exact opposite, she annoyed me even more, yet their tale and antics kept me smirking in my exasperation. I was more than a bit fraught and a cauldron of conflicted energy until in the middle of a ridiculous desert retreat with a successful charlatan, Bree smartened up that faking it wasn’t making it. As par for the course with this wily author, her writing was wryly amusing, insightfully observant, colorfully detailed, and slyly entertaining.