Sunny Song Will Never Be Famous

A Los Angeles Korean American lifestyle influencer, forced to detox from social media, finds a new way to connect while at a Midwestern farm in this thoughtful and funny novel.

Seventeen-year-old L.A.-born Korean American Sun-Hee "Sunny" Song was thrust into Internet fame as a toddler when a video of her went viral. Now a teen, she's amassed nearly 100K followers on YouTube, but her parents and her school's headmaster aren't impressed. When a cooking livestream gets unintentionally racy, it elicits the hashtag "#BrowniePorn" and jeopardizes her school enrollment. Sunny's parents, in damage control mode, send her to Iowa's Sunshine Heritage Farms for a month-long digital detox camp. Despite a strict no-devices policy, Sunny sneaks in a cellphone so she can keep tabs on an influencer contest in which she's competing. But as she participates in group sessions and farm work and grows closer to the farm owner's son, Theo, she questions whether there's more to life than likes and subscribers.

In Sunny Song Will Never Be Famous, Suzanne Park (The Perfect Escape) smartly explores identity, specifically when it is intertwined with social media. She shows not only social media's toxicity but also its use as a crutch, such as how "online Sunny could edit and delete posts when she didn't like how they came out." Park also effortlessly weaves in details about Sunny's Korean American experience, including both the commonplace, like being a second-generation American, as well as the ugly, such as casual racism and bullying. This is an insightful, pertinent and humorous novel. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader

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