Random Things Tours: Reputation by Sarah Vaughan

 ´I´ll be watching you´.

Emma, the main character from Reputation by Sarah Vaughan is a successful London-based Labour MP, who built her professional and political career carefully. As the story goes in such cases, her personal life was dramatically affected by her success. She not only had to divorce and had a complicated relationship with her teenage daughter but lately she is also the target of online bullying and abuse. Who else but a woman could experience this? You hardly heard and read about men of success being over exposed in the media for their private life...with women, sooner or later it ends up in gender-oriented abuse.

Through the carefully built story, Vaughan is using the realities of the everyday life of women on the forefront of the public life to invite the reader into what it really means to be overexposed. The vulnerability that a woman has inherited from generations of women automatically assigned the title of second-class citizens is increased by the voyeurism of social media and the unleashed freedom of the online environment. 

The story is realistic in all its smallest and biggst details. The literary talent of Sarah Vaughan added the ingredients to make it into a successful story - soon on works for TV: suspense, game of circumstances, a couple of interesting twists and last minute changes. The short stories, reduced to the essential wording do contribute to create both the tensed environment and the clarity in expressing so many complex feelings and circumstances.

Reputation is a book about our everyday - the book is set between 2021-2022, thus of stringent actuality. Through a well-written literary form, it is a wake up call requesting acknowledgment of the more or less brutal counter-reaction of society to a woman´s success. At a certain extent, it is a testimony of the weaknesses of reputation - any reputation - when facing the naked scrutinity of the online brutality.

Rating: 4.5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the book tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own