Julie Chan Is Dead, and So Is the Girl You Used to Be
Cover of Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang. Image courtesy of Liann Zhang
Brewtiful Reading Section | June 7, 2025
By Sara Alba
Rating: 5/5 🍷 For the girls who spiral in lowercase and mean it.
There are books you read for fun, and there are books that make you question your own reflection. Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang is the latter. This is not a quirky tale about mistaken identity. It’s a razor-sharp, psychologically unflinching dive into the messy tangle of grief, envy, and internet performance. It doesn’t want to be your favorite book. It wants to get under your skin and stay there.
Let’s be clear: this is not beach reading. It’s the kind of book you read in bed, at 2 a.m., half-dreading what the next chapter will reveal — about the characters, about influencer culture, and about yourself.
One Dead Influencer. One Living Twin. And a Lie That Grows Louder Every Day.
The novel opens with Julie Chan — not an influencer, not a star, just a supermarket cashier and invisible girl — finding the dead body of her estranged identical twin sister, Chloe Van Huusen. Chloe was everything Julie wasn’t: rich, beautiful, sponsored, seen. She was a fashion-forward internet personality with brand deals and curated brunches. Julie, by contrast, exists in the margins. She doesn’t just feel like a nobody — she is one, and not in the romantic, main-character-energy kind of way. In the forgettable, ignored kind of way.
So, when she finds Chloe lifeless in her apartment, what does Julie do?
She logs into Chloe’s phone. She answers her messages. She uploads a post.
She becomes her.
This Book Isn’t About Switching Lives. It’s About Deleting Your Own.
What follows is not a classic switcheroo or a glamorous impersonation story. It’s slow-burn psychological horror disguised as a coming-of-age narrative. Julie isn’t playing dress-up. She’s committing identity fraud with emotional stakes so high you’ll find yourself sweating through benign sentences.
As she steps into Chloe’s designer shoes — literally — Julie doesn’t just mimic her sister’s routines. She starts inhabiting her. Or at least, the version of her that the internet wanted to believe was real. Influencer Chloe is alive, at least on social media. And that, in this world, is enough.
Julie doesn’t become powerful. She becomes haunted.
The Writing Style: Sharp Enough to Leave Paper Cuts
Liann Zhang’s prose is quiet, clipped, and devastating. You won’t find purple flourishes or indulgent metaphors. You’ll find restraint that feels almost surgical. Every sentence is intentional. Every pause is loaded. There’s no wasted space in this novel, which makes every word feel like a clue.
Reading Zhang feels like reading someone’s carefully crafted apology — one they’ll never send. The tension simmers in the silence between what Julie feels and what she says, between what she reveals and what she edits. The result is a novel that reads like a curated Instagram feed: perfectly filtered and deeply unsettling.
A Critique of Influence That Cuts Deeper Than Likes and Follows
This isn’t just a thriller. It’s an autopsy of influencer culture. It’s about how easily we collapse a person into a brand. How someone’s pain becomes part of their “story arc.” How tragedy, when well-lit, becomes engagement.
Julie doesn’t know how to be an influencer. She just knows how to copy one. And as she fakes her way through brand meetings, beauty launches, and Instagram captions, we’re forced to ask the question no one likes to say out loud: Is there a real person under all this content?
And: Was there ever?
Zhang doesn’t answer that question. She just keeps asking it in different ways until you feel sick.
You’ll Find Yourself Rooting for Her. And Then You’ll Feel Dirty About It.
Julie isn’t a hero. She’s not even an anti-hero. She’s desperate, angry, and quietly terrifying in her own way. But here’s the thing: you’ll relate to her. Not to the fraud or the deception, necessarily, but to the craving. The craving to be seen. To be loved. To be envied. To matter.
And that’s the book’s real horror: you’ll understand exactly why she does it.
You’ll understand the hunger to be looked at — even if it means disappearing in the process.
This Isn’t a Mystery. It’s a Disintegration.
Don’t expect a tight plot wrapped in red string and police tape. There’s no detective chasing Julie. No cliffhangers every chapter. The real suspense comes from watching her lose herself — slowly, expertly, and with chilling precision.
Each chapter peels away a piece of Julie’s identity, until you’re left wondering who she even is anymore — and whether that was the point all along. Is she trying to become Chloe? Or is she trying to erase herself?
There’s no clear answer. Just silence. And that silence is deafening.
Best Read With:
Leftover takeout and a vague sense of dread
Your phone turned face-down, because this book makes you hate your own feed
A playlist of songs that remind you of your worst decisions
The text you almost sent at 1:52 a.m. last week
Final Word: This Isn’t Fiction. It’s a Mirror.
Julie Chan Is Dead isn’t about death. It’s about erasure. It’s about the ways women disappear — behind usernames, behind aesthetics, behind more successful sisters. It’s about the version of yourself you killed off quietly, hoping someone might mourn her.
This book won’t give you closure. It won’t make you feel better. It will make you think. It will make you uncomfortable. And then, when you’re alone, scrolling mindlessly and comparing your life to someone’s carefully cropped grid, it will whisper: Remember me?
Read it. Just don’t expect to be the same afterward.
