Book Review: "The List" by Yomi Adegoke

“That was the irony; men feared false accusations, but survivors were the ones being wrongly smeared. No matter how much evidence there was to support an allegation, for months afterwards accusers were demanded to #ThinkFirst”

- The List by Yomi Adegoke

I don't usually read fiction that is all the rage on social media mainly because from time to time it can seem cliché and bland. But, this book was selected as a Richard and Judy Book Club Pick as well, and they hardly go wrong with their choices. This book is really not like your average social-media-based novel because it does not truly only depend on the social media states for its storyline. Instead, it takes an aspect of social media and shows us how it can blow up in the real world, causing extremely horrid consequences for real situations with real people. The author does a fantastic job of writing in these snippets of text messages and Twitter statuses to remind us what is really at stake here: these people may use social media, but they are very real people.

This story is about Ola and Michael and they, in four weeks, are about to get married. They are very much in love and it is your average love story until a list is released on social media about men who have been abusive to women in a certain industry. Michael's name appears on the list and Ola has seen him. Confronting him in a Pret Cafe in London, Ola and Michael argue about his past which he is clearing hiding aspects of from her. So, Ola resolves as any woman would that if Michael does not offer up the truth or prove he is innocent beyond reasonable doubt - the wedding is completely off.

I don't want to say that I was excited but I was completely and utterly excited. Ola is a fantastic character with a very three dimensional life and more than likely, does not need Michael in the slightest. In the relationship, she wears the pants, she stands her ground and she determines where they go from here. She will not be pushed around or manipulated by a man who has been called out as an abuser by a list on social media which puts him among domestic violence perpetrators and serial cheaters/harrassers. It proves a hard-hitting truth to women about the men in their lives: they are always one person and another and that can flip at any time, even long after they have manipulated you into getting married to them.

However, as we see Michael's life spiral out of control - we get a look into online abuse, vitriolic hatred and mob behaviours that nobody can control. There is no evidence for these random lists that appear on social media and yet, that's it - it is done. Michael has to prove himself innocent or risk his life being ruined at every single corner he turns. Ola has already abandoned him but can he survive in the deep waters of the mob or will he sink and prove them all right about their accusations towards him? He may lose his job, he may be in grave danger in real life and he may find himself in a worse situation than he has ever possibly known. A cautionary character about how we deal with social media when it rallies against us - whether we are innocent or guilty, it does not care.

In this book of Chinese Whispers, more characters will emerge from the woodwork to be in on this unhinged plot, a social media psychodrama in which we are taught an important lesson formed as a question: do we trust the mob? If we do, how far? and if we don't, what do we do about it? The ideas about how guilty someone is on a scale of one to ten seem to knock on the doors of our own time, dragging us back on to our own accounts where we may have accused someone we know or otherwise, about something we cannot know whether they were guilty of committing. This book is a scoreboard of social media abusive behaviours, a sentencing of how guilty someone might be and a question of who may be involved and why.

All in all, I thought this book was very clever and for those of you who do not think it is, I quietly ask you to have this conversation with yourself: have you ever judged someone without evidence? Most likely, the answer is 'yes, yes and yes again.'