A spine-tingling YA thriller, based on a still-unfolding true story
THE FOLLOWER
by Kate Doughty
Amulet Books/Abrams, March 2021 (voir catalogue)
Instagram-famous triplets Cecily, Amber, and Rudy—the children of home renovation superstars—are ready for a perfect summer. They’ve just moved into the site of their parents’ latest renovation project when they begin to receive chilling messages from someone called The Follower. It soon becomes clear that this anonymous threat is more than a simple Internet troll, and he can’t wait to shatter the Cole family’s perfect veneer and take back what’s his. THE FOLLOWER examines the implications of what it is to be watched in the era of social media fame—as well as the lies we tell and the lengths we’ll go to uphold a perfect image, when our lives depend on it.
Kate Doughty graduated from the University of Virginia in May 2018 with a dual major in English and psychology. She lives and works in Washington, DC. THE FOLLOWER is her first novel.
When Trixie picks up her best friend, Lux, for their first solo weekend getaway, she’s just looking to escape for a little while, to forget the despair of being trapped in her dead-end rustbelt town and the daunting responsibility of caring for her ailing mother. But a single moment of violence will forever change the course of the girls’ lives as they become wanted fugitives. Trying to stay ahead of the cops and a hellscape of media attention, the girls encounter an unforgiving landscape, rapidly diminishing supplies, and bad choices at every turn. As they are transformed by the media into the face of a #metoo movement they didn’t ask to lead and the road before them runs out, Trixie and Lux realize that they can only rely on each other and that the love they find together is the one thing that truly makes them free.
Skye Starling is overjoyed when her boyfriend, Burke Michaels, proposes after a whirlwind courtship. Though Skye seems to have the world at her fingertips—she’s smart, beautiful, and from a well-off family—she has also battled crippling OCD since her mother’s death when she was eleven, and her romantic relationships have suffered as a result. But now Burke—handsome, older, and more emotionally mature than any other man she’s met before—says he wants to take care of her. Forever. Except, Burke isn’t who he says he is. And interspersed letters to his therapist reveal that he is happily married and using Skye for his own, deceptive ends. In a third perspective, set thirty years earlier, a scrappy seventeen-year-old named Heather is determined to end things with Burke, a local bad boy. But can her adolescent love stay firmly in her past—or will he find his way into her future? On a collision course she doesn’t see coming, Skye throws herself into wedding planning, as Burke’s scheme grows ever more twisted. Meanwhile, three decades in the past, Heather’s longed-for transformation finally seems within reach…yet even the best laid plans can go astray. And just when you think you know where this story is going, you’ll discover that there’s more than one way to spin the truth.
