If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You

A Novel

By: Leigh Stein

Narrated by: Kristen DiMercurio, Valerie Rose Lohman, Emily Marso, Leigh Stein

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “For anyone who has felt fate intervening on their TikTok feed” (USA Today) comes a “gothic horror story wrapped up in a mystery [with] much to say about Hollywood, social media, and the creator economy” (Los Angeles Times)

“Here you’ll find that gothic horror, so often lurking in the dingy dark, can manifest also in the fluorescent world of the terminally online.”—NPR

The internet: You may think you’re inhabiting it, but is it really inhabiting you?

After her boyfriend dumps her in a Reddit post, unemployed thirty-nine-year-old Dayna accepts an unusual opportunity from a man she stopped speaking to twenty years ago: If Dayna can help Craig transform his crumbling mansion into a successful hype house of influencers, he can restore his birthright to its former glory, and she can bring her career back from the dead.

But missing from the mansion is Becca, an enigmatic tarot card reader who built a rabid fandom with her cryptic, soul-touching videos . . . and then vanished. With nineteen-year-old Olivia, the newest member of the hype house (and one of Becca’s biggest fans), Dayna begins to build a social media campaign around Becca’s disappearance that will catapult the creators to new heights of success. Too bad Craig forbids Dayna from pursuing the mystery at its heart.

As Olivia searches for traces of Becca in a labyrinthine house that seems intent on hiding its secrets, and Dayna becomes entangled with both Craig and Jake, the resident heartthrob and the last person to see Becca, the two women make a shocking discovery that will upend everything.

The hilarious elder Millennial references

I loved self care, her first book so much. This met me with the same great lines like “high waisted jeans and a white tee shirt, the gen Z uniform.” And “what do all the people here have in common? They were too young to-remember 9/11?” I enjoyed many aspects of the story- the gothic house with a tarot card reader in a modern hype house twist, but I didn’t love all the characters like I did in Self Care. Not the authors fault but most people probably don’t relate to instagram influencer lifestyle.

relevance + resonance

the story is sooooo good! highly recommend!
i would have added more becca in at the end!

The best social commentary for chronically online millennials

I loved self care and I love this book so much more in so many ways. I feel so much for Dayna and the existential angst of turning 40 and being forgotten, I feel so much for the hype house kids and how they tie their value to what they can produce, but don’t we all? Stein weaves this macabre gothic story against the backdrop of a crumbling hollywood legend of a house, instantly recognizable to Angelinos. This is a book for weird girls and femmes, anyone who read flowers in the attic way too young and anyone who has ever gone live or picked up a tarot deck.

Stein is the queen of social (media) commentary...

...contained in a novel.

I normally avoid books so heavily focused on social media but since I read all of Stein's novel, I willingly used a credit. Glad I did. As always, Stein manages to tell a good story while "commenting" on everything under the sun about our world today.

This was particularly interesting because the 20-year difference between the Millennial characters (Dayna, nearly 40) and the content creators in the house they're living in (late teens to early 20s) is so stark. Ultimately, all of the characters are trying to find their way in a world that changes too fast for everyone.