A diffuse homily on technology and identity that is easy to read and easy to forget.
A Silicon Valley roman à clef with a twist, written by the first employee at Instagram.
Ethan Block is a 24-year-old living in San Francisco circa early 2010, working for a dating app called DateDate. He scrutinizes flagged user photos, manually assessing whether the images violate platform guidelines. Ethan is so immersed in the startup hustle that he basically ignores the rest of his life. “I had tremendous responsibility. Every support email I answered brought us closer to changing the world. And if DateDate changed the world, I changed the world.” When he isn’t reviewing content for The Founder—a nameless, mercurial yuppie—Ethan is brooding over Isabel, a recent ex, or Noma, DateDate’s latest hire. One day at work, while viewing his top DateDate match, Ethan briefly feels himself falling into “a field, with tall, wet grass,” before snapping back to reality, believing his hallucinatory state to be the result of a “bug” in the app. Shortly thereafter, DateDate is acquired by the Corporation, a monolithic tech outfit suffused with faceless executives and preposterously advanced technology. Ethan spends the remainder of the novel pendulously obsessing over his encounter with the “bug” in DateDate. Framed as a retrospective of Ethan’s “existence as a corporate tech worker,” the novel’s intriguing premise of a fictionalized Silicon Valley insider tell-all invites urgent questions about how technology operates in our lives. Unfortunately, Riedel glosses over key leaps in story logic and is light on memorable descriptive language. Riedel evokes the bougie Silicon Valley ecosystem by peppering scenes with cultural references, regional markers, and New Age business-speak but leaves his characters frustratingly underdeveloped. The neutral affect of Ethan’s first-person narration flattens the personal and societal stakes of the story.
A diffuse homily on technology and identity that is easy to read and easy to forget.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-81379-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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