Pod Picks Book Club! Ramona's pick: Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg

It's the powerful forces of White Whale staff picks and a community book club combined: the Pod Picks Book Club! Each month (usually on the last Thursday), a different bookseller gets to pick a book for the club to read, and they'll host the meeting, too. Book club picks will be 10% off 30 days in advance of the meeting day, to give you time to read it. And plan on grabbing a drink and a snack from the café when you come to the meeting!

Ramona's Pod Pick: Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg

Here is why Ramona picked Just Watch Me for Book club:

“I'm excited to share this strange, emotional exploration of grief and responsibility with everyone. Pitched as a mixture of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, this dark comedy is for the weirdos who don’t realize how much they're carrying until they have to set it all down and take stock of their lives. Odd fiction readers unite!” - Ramona

RAMONA (they/them) is a recent transplant to Pittsburgh from Austin, Texas. They graduated from Smith College with degrees in poli-sci and gender studies. As a lover of little objects, they have an earring collection with more than 400 pairs and can be found organizing their Sonny Angel collection. They love anything from the social science or essays shelves.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝

Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister—a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption.

Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.

Dell is her stream’s dungeon master, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on earth: the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.

Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this misguided striver with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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