I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Frances Bean has always been content living life on the perimeter. Until she gets paired up for a class project with rich and popular Julia, daughter of famous wellness guru Deena Patterson. The "magic" skincare products, healing sound baths, and extravagant parties of Deena’s company DEEP never really interested Frances before, who wears the badge of goth outcast and bookworm proudly. But face time with the girl she has been crushing on for years is starting to give her a new outlook.

When Frances gets an exclusive invite to a DEEP event, she is blown away by the beauty and luxury of Julia’s world and the group's focus on empowering girls to be their most true selves surprisingly strikes a chord. Before long Frances finds herself invested in DEEP, a whirlwind romance with Julia, and a future that feels hopeful.

But when an infamous DEEP party takes a dark turn, Frances wonders if the allure of being a part of Julia’s life was actually just a deadly distraction…

Short and Sweet Review

Frances has always been content in her skin and with her small group of friends, but when she’s paired up with Julia one of the most popular girls in school for a literature assignment things quickly change in Frances’s life. Julia’s mother is the founder of DEEP, a skincare company that also preaches empowering girls to be their true selves. When Frances is invited to one of the events she quickly becomes assimilated, not only to DEEP but to Julia too. When one of the events has a dark ending Frances has to decide whether she wants to continue blindly following the company or start questioning their truths.

I just want to start off by saying I wanted to shake Frances and say, “THIS IS A CULT, GET OUT NOW!” Anyway, I’ve always been interested in cults but seeing how it plays out is so frustrating because as an outsider looking in we can tell that what the cult leader is spewing is BS but I guess once you’re in it you’re in it and they really make you question everything you thought you knew. Let me rewind and go back a bit. Frances is paired up with Julia in class and they start to hit it off and when Frances is invited to the DEEP event and learns more about the company and talk to the other girls in the company she decides to start working for the company too. We see the group of girls who work for the company are called Femme and they all wear white and we don’t see much of Julia’s mom Deena but this guy named Kai that all the girls are enamored with. Everything about Kai was a walking red flag, flags everywhere because this man was a creep and just like any other cult leader you can think of. Slowly we see Frances get further into the company, leaving behind her friends, making excuses as to why everyone in Femme seems so strange. It’s not until we’re a little past the halfway point when we see someone die and then we see Frances start to question everything going on around her. I didn’t like the romance because Julia was already way too integrated and she was just as bad as the people around her. This book was a bit slow and it took a while for things to happen. We see a lot of gaslighting, some brainwashing, and bad choices being made. While reading this book I was frustrated and was thinking I should give this book a low rating but then after finishing I had some time to think and realized that this book actually portrays what happens in cults pretty accurately. The ending was good and things were wrapped up with most of the characters but I would have liked to see a few more face some consequences. Also shoutout to Frances’s friends for sticking around and being there for her even though she was a trash friend for a majority of the book after she got with Julia and into the groupthink mentality.

Overall, this was a good book. I keep going back and forth with how I feel, on one hand it did a great job of portraying the cult and like I said earlier I’m interested in cults because what does the leader say to have you drop everything and follow them. On the other hand it’s like why are you dropping everything to follow this charlatan. I think the premise was interesting it was a bit slow but I held on till the end to see how everything would workout and I’m satisfied. If you’re interested in cults or just skincare companies and how they use social media to reach people then this book is for you.