When May “Mother May I” Iverson’s mansion burns down with her newlywed husband inside, friends, neighbors, media, and the Iversons’ fans and enemies alike begin speculating and investigating faster than detectives.
THE INFLUENCERS
by Anna-Marie McLemore
Dial Press, March 2025
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)
May is a social media sensation, glamorous-yet-relatable, but the key to her enduring fame is her daughters, who featured in videos from their births through adorable childhoods, difficult adolescences, and terrible teens. But the girls are all grown up now, and their lingering anger and resentment from childhoods stolen by the camera have started to spill over into public view. April is a businesswoman feuding with her mother over IP; June and July are influencers themselves, possibly threatening May’s dominance; January is a theater tech who steers clear of her mother and the limelight; and March…well, March has somehow completely disappeared.
Could it be one of the girls who murdered May’s less-than-charming new groom? Or could online sweetheart Mother May I have killed the man she’d just recently married and then burned down her dream home to cover it up? Or could it be one of us, the fawning yet fickle mob of media consumers?
THE INFLUENCERS is award-winning (including recently Printz-winning) YA author Anna-Marie McLemore’s first novel for adults, told in multiple points of view, reminiscent of The Virgin Suicides, and in the vein of other compulsively readable family dramas, like The Family Fang and Dava Shastri’s Last Day.
Anna-Marie McLemore (they/them) writes magical realism and fairy tales that are as queer, Latine, and nonbinary as they are. Their books include The Weight of Feathers, a 2016 William C. Morris YA Debut Award Finalist; 2017 Stonewall Honor Book When the Moon Was Ours, which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature and was the winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Award; Wild Beauty, a Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Booklist best book of 2017; Blanca & Roja, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; Miss Meteor (co-authored with Tehlor Kay Mejia); Dark And Deepest Red, a Winter 2020 Indie Next List selection; The Mirror Season, which has recently received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Booklist and School Library Journal; Lakelore, which has received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Shelf Awareness; Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix, which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature; and Venom & Vow, co-authored with Elliott McLemore. Most recently, they contributed to the 2023 Printz-winning anthology The Collectors: Stories, edited by A.S. King.
The Soler sisters are infamous in polite society―brazen, rebellious, and raised by their fashionable grandmother who couldn’t care less about which fork goes where. But their grandmother also knows the standards that two Latina young ladies will be held to, so she secures them two coveted places at the Alarie House, a prominent finishing school that turns out first ladies, princesses, and socialites.