Fans poke fun at Millie Bobby Brown’s new book
NetflixCelebrity books can be hit or miss, and social media seems to think that Millie Bobby Brown’s first novel is the latter.
Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown has just joined the ever-growing list of celebrities turned (ghost-written) authors, though turns out that this book is based on something real that a family member went through, the Bethnal Green tube disaster.
The disaster occurred in March 1943, when a woman tripped while rushing into a London tube station for cover. This caused a crowd to topple, and resulted in a mass crush that killed 173 people. It was the single biggest loss of British civilian life during World War II, and a result of Government infrastructure negligence.
While the book covers a serious topic, it seems that the reception to the book is not so serious. In fact, after a book review went viral, multiple accounts on social media have been poking fun.
A review of Millie Bobby Brown’s book sets off Twitter
Brown’s book, titled Nineteen Steps, was written in collaboration with author Kathleen McGurl. While the book was released with limited publicity, a recent review has garnered some negative attention.
Writing for i-D, Barry Pierce describes the book as such: “Over the course of 372 large print pages, we are introduced to Nellie Morris, her younger sister Flo, the handsome lad who lives next door, Billy, as well as a rambunctious cast of “Oi, mista! You me dad?” Cockneys.
“The rest of the novel traverses through Bethnal Green in wartime, where Nellie falls madly in love with an American G.I. and, along the way, the real-life deaths of 173 people enters the plot.”
Pierce’s review takes a turn for the critical when he notes “The first page opens with the clunker: “It was hot — the kind of heat that makes you long for the weather to cool down.” This is followed by about 150 pages of walk-on characters ominously pointing out just how dodgy the steps down to Bethnal Green station are. It’s a bit like setting a novel on the Titanic and having guests randomly come out with, “oh, I sure do hope we won’t see any icebergs on our journey.”
He continues, “Look, nobody is going into Nineteen Steps expecting a masterpiece. Personally, I wasn’t even expecting it to be good. It’s a curiosity piece: a young actor branching out into (albeit ghost-written) fiction. But even as a curiosity piece, it’s pretty tasteless.”
Now, this piece has made its rounds on Twitter, with some seriously lamenting the book’s creation, while others poke fun at and discuss the first line. Check them out below:
One tweet points out that the line many are discussing “actually isn’t the first line. It appears at the end of the first paragraph of Chapter One, after a prologue, and in context is somehow even worse than you’d think.”
The book is currently available to purchase on Amazon, so feel free to check it out for yourself, at the very least to join in the Twitter fun.
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