"Having a desk job doesn't mean you have your shit together," I say. "It just means you have a flat ass from sitting all day." 😅💺
Let me begin by saying I was born in the seventies, when a stream was something at the bottom of my road that I paddled in 🌿💦, and the internet hadn’t even been thought of. This book is completely outside my comfort zone, so I was surprised I enjoyed it even as much as I did 🤔📖
The idea of someone watching and listening to my every move 24/7 is unsettling 😬👀 Dell’s world felt strange and uncomfortable at times—her life is about as far from what I’d consider normal as you can get. Some of the things she does for money really made me wonder… are there actually people out there like this? I suppose there must be 😳💸
That said, I didn’t like Dell. I found her underhanded and manipulative, with little respect for herself or anyone else. She’s not someone I’d ever want to meet 🙅♀️🚫
Thank you to Scribner UK for the gifted copy of Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg 📚✨
About the Book
Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her bathroom-less studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual, spiking 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 plant propagations to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise $14,000 for a week of private life support for Daisy.
In the dungeon of her stream, Dell is in control, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms of engagement and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. On a dare, she discovers that she has a talent for eating spicy food, and her streaming fame explodes as her pepper consumption graduates from jalapeño to habanero to ghost. Finally, Dell is good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and riskier and a troll-turned-incel 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 us through a nonstop 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 an incisive, zippy tragicomedy about the internet economy as well as a moving meditation on love, loss, and forgiveness.
About Lior
Lior Torenberg is a contemporary fiction writer whose work is shaped by a keen interest in human behavior, particularly in the way people present themselves in everyday life and online spaces. She has lived between London and New York, an experience that informs the observational tone of her writing. During the pandemic, she became fascinated by livestream culture—sparked in part by watching her roommate follow gaming streams—which later influenced her debut novel, Just Watch Me (2026). Known to have a wry sense of humor, she has described herself as a casual “hot sauce hobbyist,” a small detail that reflects her understated, personal approach to creativity. Though generally private, her work reveals a thoughtful, curious perspective on connection, identity, and modern life.
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