It’s been a bit of a flare week, so I needed an audiobook to get me through the symptoms because that’s always the best medicine. I scrolled through Kindle Unlimited looking for my next psychological thriller and landed on Her Beautiful Life by Brianna Labuskes.

First of all: holy unreliable narrator Batman. This one was so ridiculously twisty it felt like a fever dream. Between that and the constantly shifting character perspectives across a non-linear timeline, there’s a lot to keep track of.

Holland is a journalist who travels to an orchard owned by her estranged former roommate and best friend, Catriona. Known in the past as “Cat,” Catriona is now a tradwife and social media superstar. Over the course of the weekend, Holland is supposed to write an exposé on what life is really like for Catriona and her seemingly perfect family: her wealthy French husband, Kris; their six children with French names; and Kris’s teenage son from a previous marriage, who has lived with them full-time since the sudden and traumatic death of his mother. With Kris having been locked in a legal battle with his ex-wife before her death, the family’s picture-perfect image begins to unravel as the past resurfaces, and it’s only a matter of time before everything explodes.

As usual, I don’t like to spoil too much in my reviews, but the ending of this book will have you wanting to throw the book (or, in my case, my phone) across the room. It’s infuriating. But sometimes you need a book that absolutely destroys you mentally, and if you’re in that kind of mood, this one definitely delivers.

While the story is wildly unrealistic (because if this resembled any true story, it would absolutely have an eight-part Netflix docuseries by now), it serves as a perfect reminder that the lives people present on social media are rarely as perfect as they seem. That said, the book doesn’t exactly tie up its loose ends with a neat little bow. It feels more like they were haphazardly taped shut in a lazy Amazon package.