BookBrowse Reviews Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang

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In this bold and darkly funny debut novel, a woman steals her twin sister's identity and life as an influencer—but her new life of glitz and glamour quickly takes a sinister turn.

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In Julie Chan Is Dead, Liann Zhang's debut novel, Julie Chan is working a dead-end job as a supermarket cashier when she receives a phone call from her twin sister Chloe, who quickly hangs up and becomes unreachable. The two haven't spoken in years and have a frosty relationship, to say the least—after their parents died in a car accident when they were four, Chloe was adopted by a white family, the Van Huusens, while Julie went to live with her aunt. The only time Chloe, a world-famous social media influencer, ever reached out to Julie was to buy her a house, which she filmed and posted on YouTube (a video titled "Finding My Long-Lost Twin and Buying Her A House #EMOTIONAL"), before ghosting her as soon as the cameras were cut. Nevertheless, Chloe's phone call makes Julie concerned. When she breaks into Chloe's New York City apartment to try to track her down, she finds Chloe's lifeless body lying on the kitchen floor, the result of what appears to be a drug overdose.

Julie has long envied her sister's glamorous life, and when the police arrive, she makes a shameful split-second decision: she tells the officer that she is Chloe Van Huusen, and that the dead girl is her twin, Julie Chan.

The chapters that follow, in which Julie begins to play the part of Chloe Van Huusen, full-time influencer, are both funny and nerve-wracking. Julie attends early morning fitness classes, unboxes free packages from brands, negotiates sponsorships over email, and takes countless selfies, all of which she posts about on social media to her audience of millions. Julie knows she should be taking things slow and easing into her new life—and indeed, the reader watches as Julie makes a series of near-disastrous blunders as she figures things out—but on her very first day as Chloe, she receives an invitation to a networking event she can't refuse: a brand launch being hosted by Bella Marie, the self-appointed queen of social media, whom Julie has long admired.

The dynamic between Julie and Bella Marie is one of the most compelling aspects of Zhang's novel. Julie is poor and Chinese American; Bella Marie is affluent and white, with an accent that is "vague, unrecognizable, like every European country is vying for space in her beautiful mouth." But despite their differences, something about Bella Marie, whose reputation for kindness and philanthropy is well known, feels safe to Julie. Julie soon finds herself abandoning her class solidarity and anti-capitalist principles and defending Bella Marie's extreme wealth against the only other person of color in Bella Marie's inner circle, a Black woman named Iz, who is also new to the group. It's not until Bella Marie invites Julie/Chloe on a weeklong island retreat that Julie starts to realize there's a dark secret at the heart of these girls' overnight social media success—and knowing the truth could put Julie in danger.

The ephemeral nature of social media means that books about the internet often feel dated by the time they publish, but Julie Chan Is Dead feels believably current; Zhang smartly tends to reference cultural touchstones with staying power, like Succession, over short-lived memes. A former skincare content creator herself, Zhang clearly lives and breathes social media; and her fluency in the superficial world of doom-scrolling, #sponsored posts, and snark subreddits will resonate with readers who spend time in it, too. The novel's satirical portrayal of the influencer industry is extreme and over-the-top, but like all good satire, it is rooted in reality, and a lot of the book's humor relies on having a baseline knowledge of influencers. ("Try being an influencer for a day," one of the characters quips unironically—a clear nod to Mikayla Nogueira's infamous TikTok.)

Zhang may lose some readers in the second half of the novel, as her realistic setup—and more straightforwardly tense and gripping plot—gives way to an outrageously absurd and surreal denouement. But both halves add up to an incisive, cynical, and funny castigation of social media's intersection with white privilege, exposing both the artificiality of digital connections and how that artificiality bleeds into the way we navigate the real world.

This review first ran in the May 7, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.