This compelling and thought-provoking novel peels back the layers of both plastic surgery and stepping over others to get to the top of influencer social media heap, as characterized by the idolized imagery that created Instagram stars.

Step aside selfies, gorgeous backdrops, and glittering moments with other social media stars, and the ugly underbelly and dangerous extremes of what goes into building a social media persona get unflinchingly revealed. Anna at age 19 gets groomed by an unscrupulously talent agent and boyfriend, Jake, to become a high-level Instagram influencer. She’ll do anything and go anywhere to become somebody, and to attract high-paying corporate sponsors. But she mostly goes under the knife of plastic surgeries and to drug-fueled remote parties where she gets both drugged and sexually abused. Anna also abandons her dying Mom and surrogate sister in the process, losing the love and loyalty of both.

Anna, now 35, alone, and reduced to selling anti-aging cosmetics as a retail saleswoman, has decided to undergo high-risk reconstruction surgery, called “Aesthetica” that promises to reverse all the plastic surgeries and return her to looking as if she’s just aged naturally. For Anna, this comes to represent both a physical and spiritual do-over, and worth the risk of death. At the same time, she’s challenged as part of the feminist #Me-Too movement to share her experiences as other women seek to take down Jake, who’s still posting about his now picture-perfect family life on Instagram.

Having run an influencer marketing agency for a decade working with the largest U.S. consumer brands, Allie dynamically and astutely captures what can go into building on a top Instagram influencer persona.

If you want a juicy look at the toxic culture that becoming a social media influencer can entail, this book will both enlighten and terrify with its ringing truths of the devolution and trauma social media ascendancy can bring.

Thank you to Soho Press and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

Well written and timely and dark. With her entire life enmeshed in social media and cosmetic surgery, I just found it too much of a fight to connect to Anna like I wanted to. While I’m sure that was intentional, it made it harder for me to get entirely absorbed in the story.

I knew I was going to like this one after reading the blurb, and Allie Rowbottom did not let me down. Thank you to Netgalley for the eARC. I'm truly grateful!

What Aesthetica does so well is dissect the main character to such an extent that you understand her almost as well as you understand a close friend. Every action Anna took had a motivation behind it, which I loved.

I had extreme reactions to plot points in this novel -- especially towards the end. Definitely trigger warnings (and possible spoilers here so watch out) for rape and sexual assault.

Though the timeline switches between her older and younger self, there is a solid sense of rhythm that prevents one from being lost in the changes. I really enjoyed that since it really is difficult to achieve.

And the prose!! The prose was wonderful. It's been a long time since I read some proper good writing and I loved it.

Also, that cover!!! It's absolutely gorgeous 😍.

In a world where social media can become who we are and how the world sees us, the question of how we stay current arises. Plastic surgery and a new creation of self are part of the life of Anna, the now 35 year old woman who was a prime media influencer when she was 19. She had a manager/boyfriend at one point who was viciously abusive and has tried to put that part of her life behind her.

Anna decides to have a risky treatment that will reverse her former surgeries and hopefully return her to her real self. The night before this procedure she receives a request to testify about this former abuser. It throws her back into the trauma she has tried to erase. She then questions all of the decisions of her life and has to decide just who she really is.

The issues in this book are important ones for the world in which we now live. It is quite a read.

This book made me sad and angry. The story of a former influencer highlights the dangers of exposing one's life (or a fake version of life) to a world where predators lurk and wait for prey to appear in their viewfinder. Anna lived a lonely life with her mother and her best friend in Galveston, Texas. Leah and Anna weren't in the popular group in school but found joy in spending time together and creating fantasy lives they wanted to live in the future. Anna's mother allowed them the freedom to have fun, eat junk food, and stay up all night. When Leah's father is transferred to Australia, Anna is left with nothing but her dreams to be a super start and live a glamorous life in LA.

So at 18, Anna got her ticket to LA and never looked back. She grew that following on Instagram and managed to make a bit of money out of it. When she met Jake, Anna decided that he would be her ticket to fame and riches, but most importantly a million followers on Instagram. It didn't take long for Anna to pick up hints that plastic surgery, beginning with Botox, would help. Just a little here and there. The rest of the story is a nightmare that every mother fears. Anna, at age 35, decides to try a sketchy surgical procedure that will undo all her old procedures. Anna is trying to undo the physical damage with the hope that, somehow, that will help her regain an inner self that she can live with today.

I was sad and angry and disgusted by society and the many male predators that help create women who depend on them for money and fame. This is the same old story but with technology, it has grown exponentially. Allie Rowbottom gave me a shocking dose of what is happening and I appreciate the work she put into this debut novel, and the education she offers those of us who are not in the thick of things.

Thank you, NetGalley, and the publisher for this ARC.

I think I am exactly in the intended audience for this book - while it might fall flat for some, being the same age as the main character (in the older timeline), remembering the emergence of social media, the obsession with retouching pictures, making everything look perfect, etc was definitely eerily reminiscent for me. This book did a great job showing both the shallow nature of social media and the much deeper issues behind the scenes simultaneously.

This book was an experience of great tumult, bending two timelines effectively within a single, disorientating temporal space. Anna's narrative around social media and plastic surgery was underpinned by a linguistic emphasis on ambiguity which served to demonstrate the negative impact of internalising the values of a highly commodified world. Aesthetica challenges the readers certainty of individualism and stability of identity in a manner that is deeply affecting, and manages to show the breath-taking allure of social media's great illusion while simultaneously refusing to romanticise it. There were some small moments of over narration or stylistic inconsistency, but the story is definitely worth a read.

This book is a reckoning. It'll cause a stir when it comes out for its scathing critique on certain versions of feminism. Great portrayal of a specific point in all young women's lives

While I loved the idea and the vibe of this book, the execution just wasn't there for me (and I feel like the summary is a little misleading)? I was hoping for a story of a woman after she had this Aesthetica surgery, trying to navigate the world not that she doesn't have her Instagram fame and looks to rely on. Instead, the book focuses more on what got her to the point of wanting the surgery in the first place.

I did enjoy the writing, just didn't love the story itself. I would probably give something else by Allie Rowbottom a shot! If you're interested in the dark side of IG fame, this might be the right book for you.

Trigger warnings for sexual assault, drugs, eating disorders...

Thank you to NetGalley and Soho Press for this e-arc in exchange for my honest review.

Aesthetica is a disguised dystopian novel of the digital variety. In the not too distant future, there's the ability to obtain surgery that reverts previous plastic surgery in favor of a more natural appearance. While following our narrator on her journey of this upcoming procedure, she also examines her past regarding her high social media status in her late teens and early twenties, the prose of the novel having this sedated quality. Rowbottom manages to create stakes that favor the internal: the complex and conflicting feeling the narrator has about her own insecurities relative to her body and her past decisions, inflicting a sense of melancholy in the story that never feels appropriate to label as sadness. Aesthetica is certainly a very lonely book, a far cry from what social media may, on the surface, tell us is far from possible in our digital age.

beautiful prose! sharp and insightful observations about our cultural addiction to screens and likes! plastic surgery! influencers! mothers and daughter relationships! drugs! WHAT ELSE COULD YOU WANT FROM A BOOK? i inhaled this book like a pile of cocaine at an exclusive insta-brand party. i havent been able to stop thinking about @annawrey/anna wrey/and her story since i finished last night and im sure that will be the case for the days to come. this is the kind of book and crawls inside of you and hunkers down for a while.

I went into this expecting something of a new weird take on the despondent literary protagonist trope and while I did get something close to that, I found myself preferring present day Anna and wanted to see more of the world she was now trying to find herself in; having already lived through the days of Instagram face and the insidious underbelly of passive influence marketing, I wanted a richer depiction of a society where the Aesthetica procedure exists at all and so initially found tedious the era Anna was looking back on, but I gradually grew to appreciate the poignant, insightful, candid look back on who Anna was trying to be and how the world she once inhabited not only failed to nurture her but preyed on her too. While not necessarily reinventing the wheel, Aesthetica is an absorbing meditation on how glamour and grotesquery live in concert with one another and Allie Rowbottom’s sardonic characterizations and melancholic depictions will stick with me through time.

This book really captured the insidious side of influencer culture. It's a scathing indictment of the insecurity, abuse and trauma that a young model experiences, amidst a plastic surgery horror show. Harrowing stuff.

This book was an unexpected love. I couldn't put it down and was on the brink of tears for almost the whole thing. This is beautifully written and a unique story from a unique perspective. I don't think we see enough novels written about the effects of social media on women who are "influencers". I loved how multiple different ideas are covered, mother-daughter relationships, estranged friendships, eating disorders, drug use, sexual assault. You name it this book has it and it's done surprisingly tastefully, not glamourising anything. This book means so much and I think that all young women should read this. I can't speak enough about how perfectly heartbreaking this book is. Just brilliant.

Where to start? Aesthetica follows Anna, an Instagram-famous #influencer who has recently left Houston to move to LA and chase her dreams of fame. Throughout the novel we watch Anna at two stages in her life: Anna, the 19-year-old rising star on social media, and then 15 years later at 35, Anna who struggles with a journey of reflection and transformation on the eve of her ‘Aesthetica’ surgery. The Aesthetica surgery is described as a highly dangerous operation and promises to use ‘4D technology’ to reverse the plastic surgeries of a patient's past. If this doesn’t really make sense . . . that’s okay – I’m not sure it’s meant to.

Anna’s journey as a rising star sees her leave the security of her mother’s – who now only seems to be able to get in contact with her via comments about how much she has changed on her Instagram (?) – home. During her stay in LA, Anna receives a DM from Jake (alpha man with followers), who quickly becomes her only support in the city, acting as her manager and friend-with-benefits/boyfriend? (I don’t know if I would go as far as saying ‘boyfriend’, but he does pay $9,000 for her boob job, which she didn’t want? So, like, romantic?).

‍‍Anyhow, the novel continues to explore themes around the price of fame and being true to yourself. Our protagonist is not only challenged by her isolation in LA and her estranged childhood best friend living in Australia but also the dwindling health of her mother in Houston.

As the novel explores the two stages in the same timeframe, there’s a clear shift in Anna’s growth and maturity, which speaks to a lot of the experiences we see online today involving catfishing, photo-editing and friendship. It was interesting to read these two experiences at the same time, but it also got confusing as it wasn’t clearly indicated or marked when a shift in time had occurred.

On this, there were so many parts of the plot that didn’t line up, which really added to a lack of cohesive storytelling that didn’t reflect reality. This can especially be seen in her friend, who travels from Australia to the USA and stays for a shorter period of time then she would’ve been on the plane. And yet we’re meant to believe that this character is struggling on university scholarship money.

‍‍It must be noted that a large focus of the book is sexual relationships and there should be a huge trigger warning for sexual assault – the book does focus on being taken advantage of by those around you that you trust, with a particular emphasis on keeping up with societal beauty demands (natural vs thick vs slim vs full vs curvy). Ultimately, the book falls into speculation around the social media industry and the #MeToo movement; however, it fails to do this in a comprehensive or considerate way.

The entire novel seems to be incredibly surface-level, and it does not achieve anything unique or add any additional commentary to the discussions around social media and #MeToo, which is disappointing and made the entire read a lot of work for very little payoff. It also lacked any real analysis of the various parts of Anna’s life that were raised to be of foundational value, like her estranged childhood friend in Australia, her roommates that we never read about again after the first few pages, her relationship with her mother and her health, just to name a few.

‍‍Secondary note, I tend to like reads that stretch the boundaries or norms of what a book can be and achieve (see No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood), but having emojis and hashtags scattered throughout this was incredibly distracting and just removed the sense of depth that the author was trying to achieve. I say this because it wasn’t an occasional use of the form but in replicating a ‘comment section’ you are faced with half a page of random emoji use. I don’t think it added to the value of the story nor created any meaningful understanding of Anna’s situation.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this read to anyone. I think the focus of the novel became unclear as the author tried to creatively add a novel contribution to the discussions around #MeToo and social media. I can see what was trying to be achieved with a work like this, but at times it became painful to read about Anna’s experiences, which created a disconnect between Anna and the audience and made it hard for us to sympathize with her.

Original rating: 1.5 (rounded up to 2 for NetGalley)

This was an interesting book, but overall I found it pretty depressing. I didn’t like the main character. I was hoping for more of a sci-fi story about the Aesthetica procedure, but that wasn’t a huge part of the book. I’m glad I read it, though.

Different sort of book but a good one no the less. You almost feel sorry for the main character in this one. Well written and worth a read.

What a harrowing, disconcerting book. From the depths of current social trends comes Aesthetica, here to disrupt your morning, afternoon, night. I loved this and I cannot stop thinking about it.

This is a gripping novel, I couldn't put it down from the moment I picked it up. This reads as almost a thriller, but it's also imbued with Allie's signature tenderness and vulnerability. We are attached to Anna from the beginning. It also brings into question - without judgement - if plastic surgery speaks to anti-feminist rhetoric or for it. Rowbottom leaves the reader to come to their own conclusions. Loved it.

Wow, I finished this book in one sitting. The story is deeply enthralling, culturally relevant, and feels very in line with topics people are discussing now especially surrounding the internet, influencers, sexual violence, and body image. Overall I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it, but I will say I sometimes found myself scrambled with the moving back and forth in time. That's not my favorite structure for a book so that's a me issue, but I'm sure plenty of people won't mind it. This book does need a trigger warning for sexual violence which I wish I had known going in.