Book Review: Clickbait | Holly Baxter

Journalists are meant to cover the news, not to be the news. Unfortunately Natasha finds herself on the wrong side of this equation in Holly Baxter’s Clickbait. Don’t let the cute cover and title fool you, this is a book with depth to it. Surprising and hard to put down!

What is Clickbait about?

The first thing they tell you when you begin your training is never to become the news.  Natasha has screwed up royally. Her mistake isn’t just embarrassing, it’s a breach of journalistic ethics that makes headlines and costs her a plum job reporting from London. Back in New York at thirty-five and single, divorced from a kind man she loved, she finds herself at the bottom of the media food chain—a junior reporter at a clickbait factory, rewriting sensational tabloid stories to make them just different enough to avoid lawsuits.  

As if her professional fall from grace weren’t bad enough, she’s taken the money she’d saved for a down payment for a home on a charming Brooklyn block with her husband, and rashly bought a boxy apartment overlooking the gray ocean in Rockaway Beach, Queens.  Though seeing friends and family only serves to remind her of what she’s lost, things begin to pick up when her ex-boyfriend Zach moves back to New York and accepts her offer of a spare bedroom. The arrangement is strictly platonic, of course—for him. But Natasha can’t help but wonder whether he might be the solution to all her problems.  As Natasha’s obsession with Zach grows and her involvement in increasingly dystopian “churnalism” deepens, her worlds threaten to collide in the most cataclysmic, extremely public way. 

What did I think?

This book is nothing like I expected. It has the type of cover that has become a rom com signature over the past decade. This is definitely not a rom com, though. It’s contemporary fiction, which could share some overlap to have the similar cover style. In this case, it’s not quite right. I love the cover and I enjoy the book, but this book has some heavy themes to it. It also has a lot of humor and some absurd scenarios that are characteristic of the lighthearted side of contemporary fiction.

The book picks up with Natasha who has had her marriage end, was sent back to the states, and is banished from the prestige of true journalism to pump out clickbait-worthy headlines about the most absurd corners of the internet. We know early on that whatever caused this major setback in her career also caused her divorce. But when I tell you that I would never in one million years have guessed the reason behind it all, I mean it! I’m blushing, I’m giggling, and covering my eyes in secondhand embarrassment even thinking about it! This was NOT a case of something being overblown. Holy moly, miss Natasha! You need to clean this up (this meaning your life and yourself). 

There is a lot to unfold. The moments with her work and the “stories” she is now covering plus her interactions with her new (inexperienced) boss are constantly entertaining. But the bulk of the story is about Natasha. Baxter explores her character in a deep way. She is flawed to her core. This in many ways was why I liked the book so much. Natasha is authentic. She’s not even sure why she did what she did at first. She also hasn’t fully acknowledged what a colossal mistake it was. It continues to reverberate through her life, and Natasha herself is in a dark place for quite a bit of the book. Will she find redemption? Will she repair her marriage? Will she end up with the ex-boyfriend who finds his way into her apartment? I’m going to take those answers over to the spoiler review!

I ended up enjoying this book. It’s a well written character study with enough funny moments to balance out the bleakness of Natasha’s situation and life. Expect to see front row the journey to the bottom of mental health and where that takes her. The ending to me felt unpredictable. In part because there were so many ways the author might wrap this up. In love? Single? With redemption? Still on her journey? You’ll have to read to find out which!