Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister—a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption.

Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.

Dell is her stream’s dungeon master, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.

Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this charismatic misfit with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.

I preordered this book the second I read the synopsis. A 24-hour livestream, a woman willing to eat increasingly dangerous peppers for money, a sister in a coma, and the dark underbelly of internet fame? Sign me up. I went in excited and ready to be entertained. What I got instead was more complicated than I expected.

The book is well-written. That needs to be said upfront. Torenberg has real talent, and there are scenes here that genuinely moved me. The writing is sharp, the premise is inventive, and the structure works. The problem I had was with the main character. I never fully connected with her.

Dell Danvers is a mess. She’s broke, she’s desperate, and her younger sister Daisy is in a coma while the hospital threatens to pull the plug. Dell starts streaming as a last-ditch effort to raise money for private life support. What begins as a sympathetic story quickly turns into a full-blown spectacle. Dell discovers she has a freakish tolerance for spicy food, and her viewership explodes. Jalapeños turn into ghost peppers. Ghost peppers turn into Carolina Reapers. And Dell keeps going, chasing clicks, donations, and validation (and wrecking her stomach in the process).

Here’s where I hit a wall. I am not someone who craves that kind of attention. I’m fine with recognition. I can do public speaking. I did theatre, which absolutely requires people to look at you. But those things are temporary. They have an endpoint. What Dell is doing is different. She’s performing nonstop, seeking attention from anyone who will give it to her, hungry for follower counts and likes and comments and tips. It’s the kind of attention-seeking that feels performative and exhausting, and honestly, it wore me down.

The further Dell spirals, the harder it became for me to connect with her. She’s willing to do anything for money while thousands of strangers watch. She escalates. She doubles down. She ignores every warning sign her body is giving her. And yes, I get it. That’s the point. This is a book about the dangers of parasocial relationships, the exploitation of the internet economy, and what happens when people treat their pain like content. I understood what Torenberg was doing. I just couldn’t get past my own annoyance that someone would do this to themself long enough to fully invest in Dell as a character.

That said, this book isn’t without its strengths.

The relationship Dell has with her mother and her sister is where the story really shines. Those scenes are deeply human. The flashbacks to who Dell was before she started spiraling were my favorite parts of the book. They gave her dimension. They showed a version of her that wasn’t performing, wasn’t chasing validation, wasn’t destroying herself for an audience. I wished there had been more of that Dell and less of the livestream chaos. (Though, I realize the point of the book was the chaos.)

The book is also a genuinely quick read. It moves fast. The tension escalates. And even though Dell got on my nerves, I couldn’t stop reading. It’s like watching a trainwreck livestream from a creator who is clearly spiraling, and you know you should click away, but for some reason you just keep watching. That pull is real, and Torenberg captures it perfectly.

There’s also a shadowy troll threatening to expose Dell’s dark past, which adds another layer of tension. The stakes are high. The consequences feel real. And the book doesn’t shy away from the uglier sides of internet culture.

But in the end, I struggled with this one. It’s a book I really wanted to love, and instead I just liked it. The writing is strong. The premise is bold. The family dynamics are compelling. But Dell’s relentless attention-seeking wore me down, and I never fully connected with her the way I hoped I would.

If you’re someone who is fascinated by internet culture, parasocial relationships, and the performative nature of online fame, this book will probably land much harder for you than it did for me. If you’re drawn to messy, complicated protagonists who make questionable choices in real time, Dell might work for you. But if you’re like me and struggle with characters who are constantly seeking validation through performance, this one might leave you feeling more conflicted than satisfied.

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