My First Book is a collection of short stories loaded with satirical musings that playfully interact with the online world, language and culture of those who could be thought of as ‘terminally online’. A generational hot take on adolescence, love, endless scrolling and the soap-opera like trivialities that can tear us apart. At the heart of it all is the narrator, or Honor Levy, ever-so-poignantly self-aware. It’s not quite auto-fiction because it reads more like Levy cosplaying as Levy, but what the prose does well is illuminate a fragile imagining of the self on the threshold of independent identity, reflecting the excitement of entering a world full of possible risk and danger. It’s refreshing to read something where connection, even if dangling by a thread, is thought to have ‘cash value’. To quote Levy, ‘I’m desperate to define myself and redefine myself because that is what it means to be young. Remembering that you won’t be young forever is hard when you have been young forever.’ Similar to Joan Didion’s critique and documentation of American life, Levy over the course of the book delves into the structures of our contemporary culture and even mirrors some of Didion’s sharp observations, such as, ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’.

With this in mind, My First Book clearly hits differently with its main character clapbacks. And it might just take a certain kind of reader, with a wi-fi whiz’s acumen, to understand the wordplay when she says things such as, ‘She was posted up, sleeping beauty GIF, a maiden in an unmade bed, posting, Just a Girl boss Building her Empire’. But, the whimsical ‘if you know you know’ world of Honor Levy is something I might be embarrassed to admit I understand.