Publication Date: January 20th, 2026
Hardcover. 288 pages.
Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual 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 plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.
Dell is her stream’s dungeon master, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll 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 through a 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 a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen."
Okay, this was an interesting one!
When Just Watch Me starts, Dell is just about on the verge of losing her job--and then, before we even get to know her, she’s unemployed and in desperate need of money. She’s living in a crappy illegal NYC apartment (that she’s also behind on rent for), her sister is in a coma and will soon have her life support pulled if Dell and her mother cannot come up with more money, and things just generally are not going well for Dell. So... Dell starts streaming--and doesn't stop. She doesn’t have any major goal in mind other than that she hopes she can start raising money for her sister from strangers on the internet. And that decision launches all of us onto a strange, unsettling journey…and it is certainly a weird one.
I found it incredibly hard to put down and walk away from Dell’s life. Dell is utterly compelling and she’s a bit of a mess, and she’s definitely not the most likable character, but not in a way that pushes the reader away. Rather, she feels incredibly human and is someone that you can actually care about, even when she does things that make you uncomfortable. And in Just Watch Me, there were many moments that made me feel uncomfortable and uncertain at times, but in ways that felt very real and intentional and worked perfectly with the tone of the story.
At times, reading this felt like watching a slow-motion train wreck. I couldn’t condone half of what Dell was doing and I disagreed with so many of her choices, but I also couldn’t look away from any of them. She’s impulsive and explosive, and that impulsiveness gets her into trouble almost immediately (as we see early on with how it costs her her job). But at the same time, she’s also intensely present in her life and really puts herself out there and takes action (even when it’s not always needed).
This story felt chaotic in a way that really reflected Dell’s own personality. In some ways, not much necessarily “happens” in this book, but at the same there was so much constantly happening within Dell and around her. There a sort of momentum and relentlessness to this book that never let me feel fully settled, largely because I never really knew where Dell was going to take us next.
At its core, I really appreciated how much this book took a really interesting look at how we both connect and fail to connect with other people. It really digs into societal expectations, familial obligations, financial pressures, and the weight of being responsible for those around us--especially those we love, and especially when we don’t even know how to be responsible for ourselves (or when we can’t, sometimes).
While there are plenty of less serious moments that feel messy, awkward, even a little amusing, there’s also a lot of heart underneath everything. This book is about connection and loneliness, friendship, grief, and what it means to just keep going and plugging along even when everything in your life feels unstable. It also really shows how grief can impact our decision-making and desperation can push us into weird corners and make us do things we’d never expect to do.
I would not say that this is a fun read, or even a comfortable one, but it’s absolutely an absorbing and raw read. Once I started, I found it hard to stop watching Dell try to survive in whatever way she could. I think this is certainly worth the read and will be sure to look out for more work from this author in the future!
