A six-year-old child has been kidnapped, the investigators are groping in the dark, no hypothesis to solve the case lasts longer than three hours. In the meantime, the inspectors are already hoping for a ransom demand, at least then it wouldn’t be a child molester. Kimmy is a gorgeous girl, known to millions of people because she is the star of the Youtube page “Happy Récré” which her mother Mélanie started and which has since made a fortune from advertising and product placement thanks to thousands upon thousands of followers .
When a demand for money finally arrives, it is said to be in favor of the child protection organization “Enfance en danger”. The parents are only too willing to pay, the veteran police officers from the headquarters of the Paris police department are irritated. Only Clara, member of the homicide squad and recorder of the case, suspects something. She had taken it upon herself to look at all the stories and posts with and about Kimmy.
Sammy, the better-behaved son, still experienced great blogger fame, then he was seized with massive paranoia
What struck her was the mother’s rock-hard, brutal happiness when she asked “my loved ones” to subscribe and like. “Hello my dears, thank you so much! You were very, very many who voted to help us and you chose the gold Nike Air for Kimmy!” In addition, the little girl’s visibly diminishing enthusiasm, who, like a trained animal, was led to all sorts of activities that the mother and the producers of the advertised products had thought up. Maybe it’s not a kidnapping, but the child could have escaped the compulsion to produce new films itself.
With the end of the investigation, Kimmy got into the car of a former neighbor and stayed with her for a few days, the story does not end for the author. She projects the lives of Kimmy and her brother Sammy into the future of 2031, when they come of age. Kimmy now wants to see her files with Clara’s help and files a lawsuit against her mother: abuse and the right to one’s own image. Sammy, the better-behaved son, experienced a period of great blogger fame before he became paranoid.
Delphine de Vigan: The children are kings. Novel. Translated from the French by Doris Heinemann. Dumont-Verlag, Cologne 2022. 320 pages, 23 euros.
(Photo: picture alliance/dpa/Dumont)
Only Mélanie, the Youtuber mother, does not let up. It’s not even about the income for her: it’s the increase in the number of followers, the increase in importance that drives her like an addiction: “She needed the attention of these people. Their compliments. They made her feel unique . A person who deserved attention. She had nothing to be ashamed of.” Parallel to Mélanie’s greed for audience, Clara feels a fascination just like the many fans – whether it’s Mélanie’s charisma or her pretty daughter, de Vigan leaves open. Instead, she looks back on Mélanie’s youth when she watched the French version of Jungle Camp with her family and was fascinated by its stars, while she herself was a rather unremarkable girl whose own mother hardly admitted any talent.
The potential for damage that social media has for children and adolescents in particular hardly needs to be explained. The constant pressure to increase the number of followers as an indication of one’s own value, the urge for self-optimization and the compulsion to produce new content at high frequency are also scientifically recognized and described. So it could seem like a cheap choice of topic that the author apparently wrote this book for a rather casual reason: she got the idea from a television report about child influencers who held a book signing session in a supermarket.
Adult behavior can wreak havoc on children’s souls
In fact, however, it is the subject of two books by Delphine de Vigan that are already available, which devastation the behavior of adults can wreak in the souls of children. In “My Mother’s Smile” she tells the story of a woman who, as a girl in her fifties and sixties, is a successful model through her mother’s mediation and later has a completely dysfunctional existence; in “Loyalties” she shows that children stick by their parents, no matter how badly they treat them, and how much it can weigh on them when they suddenly have to bear responsibility for their parents.
Delphine de Vigan turns her concerns into entertaining novels. The results of her research are dressed in short dialogues or made into elements of the plot. Comparisons with earlier cases of child abduction and the typographically contrasting police reports make this novel seem like a report in parts. Thanks to the translator, the different registers of her vocabulary have found a successful equivalent in German.
As with her previous books, “The Children Are Kings” is hard to put down: the criminal story of an alleged kidnapping, the engaging novel about the effects of social media and finally the psychological drama of an addict, her co- Dependence captive husband and children at her mercy, one of whom remains loyal until the damage is done while the other manages to get out in time.