‘Eating, sleeping, breathing, reading’: the zoella book club and the young woman reader in the 21st Century

This article considers the development and promotion of WH Smith’s Zoella Book Club and its success in developing an online community who share a reading experience through their engagement with the club. The Zoella Book Club is considered in relation to contemporary celebrity book club culture, as well as within an historical context that appraises the Zoella Book Club in terms of the construction and promotion of ideal(ised) notions of the young woman reader. Through its aesthetic, choice of books and rhetoric, the Zoella Book Club propagated, commodified, and ultimately perpetuated, highly feminised and domestic imagery to construct an image of the ideal woman reader in the twenty-first century.