Clare Nolan is art. A masterpiece of her own making; clever, charming, funny, and beautiful. At seventeen, Clare’s life is exactly how she’s always wanted it to be. She’s learned how to breeze through it, flask in hand, doing everything she wants to do and nothing that she doesn’t. She has a close-knit group of friends and an endless stream of male adulation. She is the girl in every song, every movie, every poem ever written by a man. But this is Clare’s story, told by Clare herself, and not some boy using all the wrong words.

Then there’s the story that Clare can’t narrate. Steeped in the film, literary, and television influences from which she has molded her personality, Clare may be irresistibly charming and magnetic, but she is also deeply, sometimes unforgivably, flawed. An arrogant, self-aggrandizing, deeply broken child, who loves her little “found family” deeply, loyally, but with an aching desperation sure to leave marks. The reality of her world is frequently messier, more complicated, more dangerous, and more painful than Clare is willing to own.

Idolatry is an intensely chaotic love story. Between Clare and an unlikely boy, between Clare and her friends, and, above all else, between Clare and herself.