The List: The instant Sunday Times bestselling debut novel – ‘The perfect summer read’ Paula Hawkins

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Ola and Michael are a glamorous couple in media and popular on social media and are getting married. Fans of No One Is Talking About This or So You've Been Publicly Shamed will definitely appreciate the fictional takes in “The List”. the list follows ola, a high profile journalist and influencer (along with her fiancé michael), as she grapples with a list that challenges her relationship and her trust—a crowdsourced list of abusers in the uk media industry that contains michael's name on it. She co-wrote the bestselling self-help manual Slay in Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible in 2018 and made the Forbes 30 under 30 list three years later. Young, beautiful, successful – she and her fiancé Michael are the ‘couple goals’ of their social networks and seem to have it all.

I thought from the blurb that The List, Yomi Adegoke's first novel, might take a satirical, slightly skewed view of this high-powered media world, like RF Kuang's Yellowface or Zakiya Dalila Harris's The Other Black Girl. However, so many issues are contended with, within the story, I felt it fractured any one, particular, message. Challenging the discourse of victim blaming and online witch hunts, The List doesn’t promise any answers – and it needn’t.As I was reading, my loyalties swung from Ola to Michael and back as we see the flaws and ugliness of behaviour but also vulnerability from their perspectives. It’s early in the morning, and Ola, an outspoken feminist and journalist on a women’s magazine named Womxxxn, is hungover after spending an evening at a private members’ club in Soho, London, with her fiance, Michael, whom she first met at a networking event for up-and-coming Black Britons. Most of all, I found the two protagonists so painfully underdeveloped as characters that it just made the book feel even slower. Ola Olajide, a celebrated journalist at Womxxxn magazine, is set to marry the love of her life in one month’s time.

the premise and writing style is gripping and compelling (although a lot of times the cliffhangers felt like it was written more for a show instead of a book).In The List we are taken to London where we meet Ola Olajide, an upcoming journalist at a feminist magazine who will be marring the love of her life, Michael, in less than a month. This had the bones of a good story in there, and the author clearly understood the basics of the story. I understand why she felt she had to include so many subplots, wanting to show different sides of this story; but it makes the book feel like it ultimately isn't saying anything new about cancel culture, where it could have been much bolder and sharper. That's where I begin to have problems with this book because even while it tried to do it with surprisingly interesting points of view and debates, it became boring, superficial narrating, annoying underdeveloped characters, and what the main point was.