Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter is a delightful and witty contemporary thriller that cleverly satirizes the world of startup culture. Set in the fast-paced tech industry, the story follows a quirky protagonist as they navigate the absurdities and cutthroat nature of the startup world. Etter's writing is sharp and humorous, blending elements of suspense and dark comedy seamlessly. The novel offers a scathing critique of the tech industry's obsession with success and innovation, while also delivering an engaging and entertaining plot. Ripe is a refreshing and entertaining read that expertly combines humor and thrills to shed light on the quirks and pitfalls of startup culture.

Quite unique. A powerfully charged job that pokes fun at Silicon Valley techbro culture, Cassie's character has walked into a corporate nightmare and doesn't really know how to get out. There's a lot of smart humour of Ivy League grads complaining about snacks, and the view of the unhoused folk allows an easy sense of hypocrisy. Etter's narration is biting, magical realism mixed in with dogmatism and pragmatising to tackle a toxic workplace and depression that esclates into a way that you don't think it's going to and then you're surprised when it slowly creeps up on you out of nowhere.

It reminded me a lot of Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This but that might be just because I was reading the books at the same time. Etter is skilled at crafting Cassie's eccentricity and the magical realism blends science fiction and grounded fantasy together in a believable way; there's few comparisons to this book that can easily be made - it opts for a nice, little, empty headspace.

I have a problem with NetGalley books and library books especially lately; I'm reading so much good fiction that I want to buy the book which defeats the whole purpose of the Galley/library books. Etter's prose is skillful, manipulative and entrancing - a personal, innermost reflection mixed with real time plot that works wonders.

Well this was a delight! Not because it was sugar coated or frilly but because it was really ominous and quite a frank portrayal of life in the modern day.

Following Cassie at her recently acquired job in Silicon Valley, we see her struggle with the toxic working culture as well witnessing the obscene wealth that lives alongside abject poverty. While workplace parties are lavish affairs, many of the cities homeless are bathing in the river just nearby. Drugs feature quite heavily from the start as people try to self soothe and within the first few pages Cassie witnesses another horror of the city when there is a man on fire.

I have to be completely honest and admit that I wasn't hooked right away (I was worried I would hate Cassie) and found the definitions of words a bit jarring. After a few chapters I was definitely hooked though, this was probably helped by the introduction of the black hole which has followed Cassie round since birth, it was a great way to personify her feelings and create a sense of tension throughout the book. I don't want to spoil anything but I really appreciate the way the characters were introduced and seeing the different relationships at play.

If you like the TV shows Succession and Severance I would definitely say this book has similar vibes (I know it's a bit weird to compare with TV but this is what came to mind). But if you want a bookish comparison then I'd say it's got a feeling of 1984 about it (although sadly less dystopian and more realistic) with a hint of The Circle too. Well worth a read!

Ripe has already become what I know to be one of my favourite books - I wish I could go back a few days and read it for the first time all over again.

We follow Cassie as she navigates her demanding job in Silicon Valley, the toxic corporate workplace, a doomed relationship and rocky friendships. From the start we are also aware of ‘the black hole’, which in itself is a main character. The all encompassing void that she has had since childhood.

It has satirical undertones about gender, toxic positivity and workplace dynamics - without being so comical that they make you believe that Cassie’s life couldn’t be someone’s real one somewhere in San Francisco.

The novel is structured through a first person narrative via Cassie in real time, flashbacks to a difficult childhood and dysfunctional family dynamics and dictionary definitions. The later I was worried would come off as gimmicky, but reading the book it did not take you out of the narrative and was well woven into the story.

I also enjoy when a story features symbolism, as it does here with black holes and pomegranates - pushing the reader to think outside of the narrative.

Usually when I have a book on my kindle, I would find no use in a physical copy - but I cannot wait to purchase one of this book and will probably reread before the years end.

Thank you to Sarah Rose Etter, Verve and Net Galley for the ARC, in exchange for an honest review.

This was an intense read. A real mix of hopelessness, corporate toxicity and struggle to be in today's world - but with a bit of a horror / magical realism type edge. The definitions to give structure and context was a really interesting touch. I definitely found it dragged a little at times, but that almost helped contribute to the overall feel. Will need to sit with this one for a while.

The book is well written and I ppreciated the storytelling. The work environment is described in a realistic way.
I wasn't a huge fan of Cassie because I spent a lot of fime wondering why she didn't resign or find another job.
Talent retention and management are two of the buzz word in HR world, especially in high tech HR world.
This means I don't understand.
Not my cup of tea
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

The irony of writing this review on a Monday morning procrastinating against getting ready to go into the office to work is not lost on me. This book is at its core Monday morning anxiety personified.

Cassie is a year into her “dream job” at a cutthroat Silicon Valley startup, but is trapped in a corporate nightmare. Long hours, toxic bosses, unethical demands, surveillance like performance monitoring. Spending her days surrounded by the “believers” she struggles to reconcile the world in which multibillion dollar companies with Ivy League employees can work with views of such abhorrent sights of poverty literally outside of their office windows.

This had a dystopian quality to it but alas I do not feel it is at all fantasy to some. The ever increasing competitiveness of business with its constant stream of new young hungry graduates willing to accept less for the promise of more. I am lucky in that my job is far from the nightmare Cassie found herself in but I did recognise the pressure to perform, the squeeze on resources directly being syphoned onto the workloads of existing employees.

Rose Etter brilliantly uses metaphors within her writing. There is a pomegranate (hence the cover art) but my favourite was that of a black hole to explore Cassie’s depression. We get both descriptive prose and also scientific facts which was so visually powerful and effective in building up the tension and pressure she felt as a character.

Darkly funny, painful sharp in its observations this book was like picking a scab, a little bit painful, runs the risk of leaving a scar but so very very satisfying.

I started to read this one alongside other books because I found myself bookless with only my kindle app on my phone and then failed to return to any other reads until I had greedily gobbled it alI up! If you are a fan of the sad girl troupe this is one you need on your radar come August when it is released.

Thank you @verve_books @netgalley for this early opportunity to read such a captivating book. Loved it!!

The description doesn't do this novel justice, if you ask me. It presents the story as a contemporary, set in Silicon Valley, that deals with depression and a toxic workplace... and while this isn't untrue, it doesn't capture what Ripe actually does.

It is books like this that get under my skin. I can read about gore, abuse, war, horrific tragedy and, while I am moved, I don't feel depressed. This book is depressing. And I feel it should come with a warning to those struggling with depression precisely because it is so good at capturing the darkness of that feeling, that head place where everything in the world takes on an ugliness.

Ripe uses elements of magical realism-- namely, a black hole that follows Cassie around, waxing and waning with her mood --and the writing itself is sometimes dreamy and poetic. At times, it feels slightly satirical. It is certainly not what I would describe as a regular contemporary novel. But I did find the short, hard-hitting chapters really compelling and effective.

Cassie attempts to survive in a job that constantly demands more from her than she can physically give. She attempts to have a relationship with a man who, no matter how appealing, will never be truly available to her. She attempts to keep going, get up, go to work, keep smiling, as the homeless sleep on the streets around her, as the company she works for exploits another eager young worker. She feels herself playing the game, shitting on others to keep her job, and hates herself for it. To cope, she imagines she is two people-- the real her, and her fake self.

The ending felt a little unfinished to me, but I have no clue how you should end a story like this.

A post for Ripe from Sarah Rose Etter appeared on my Instagram feed not long ago. Toxic work culture, the topic of the book, certainly is a much debated topic between me and my friends and so Ripe quickly piqued my interest.

With the impending pandemic as a backdrop Cassie finds herself in a soul-sucking Silicon Valley job, that values productivity over everything else, including her well-being, mental health and spare time. In the book we follow her sliding further into her own personal black hole of a demanding job, rising living costs and an unhealthy relationship. Yet, each morning she chooses this lifestyle that slowly burns her out all over again.

Sarah Rose Etter uses definitions as a way to give a backstory, which perfectly gives more context on Cassie's character. Ultimately the book was much darker than I expected it to be and was quite an exception to my very slow reading habit this year as I could rarely put it down.

Visceral and mind-bending, I loved how weird and poignant this novel is. This book drips with disdain for the 'rat race', the perpetuation that sacrificing yourself for your career is the only way to be truly successful. our main character is chaotic and self-destructive, but her motivations are so clearly defined by her narcissistic mother and disengaged father. Etter's writing makes you want to punch every single character in the best, most satisfying way. the plot is very much an 'open to interpretation' style so I think every reader could pull something different out of the story, which I find really interesting. Loved!

oh my god. this was good. one of my most highly anticipated new releases of 2023, and it did not disappoint. sarah rose etter didn’t lie, she wrote a banger.

beautiful, poignant, evocative. it perfectly captures the melancholic monotony of working a 9-5 job at the clst of a deteriorating mental health. it’s genius.

cassie (including her black hole) is such a tender character and some moments with her were so utterly vulnerable that it made me ache with sympathy, empathy some times too. this is definitely sad girl literature - could see shades of ling ma’s “severance”, moshfegh’s “my year of rest and relaxation” in this. if you enjoyed those, you’d enjoy this.

can’t wait to get my hands on a physical book so i can reread it and highlight, annotate certain lines, paragraphs.

thank you so much to sarah rose etter and her uk team for granting me an early ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Very conflicted on how I feel about this book as I really enjoyed the last 15%, but the former 75% felt very convoluted.

Ripe follows Cassie as she tackles working in a toxic tech firm, whilst seeing a man who’s in a relationship, and also has a pretty poor relationship with her friends and mother. Amid all this, there is a virus spreading and the city is very slowly starting to go into isolation.

The parts where Cassie was going about her days in the present tense at her work place and with her ‘boyfriend’ and friends were engaging and enjoyable but throughout the book there are lots of paragraphs reflecting on the past that felt like a too try-hard attempt to be deep and meaningful.

It felt like the love child of Severance (Ling Ma) and Self Care (Leigh Stein).

I do think a lot of people will really enjoy this book, but I’ve come to the conclusion that although I love the concept of a book that discuss the toxic work place and hustle culture, I often feel like they’re never well executed.

I found this book to be just a little too relentlessly harrowing and depressing. It was also really rooted in realism, which made for hard reading. An important read, but a tricky one to "enjoy."

3.5 stars. Ripe is a novel about corporate toxicity, and follows a young women named Cassie who takes a job in San Francisco where it values productivity over everything else, including Cassie’s time, mental health and physical well-being. The novel explores the problems of millennial corporate jobs through dark satire as the company becomes increasingly suffocating and problematic.

My main problem with the novel was that I felt it had a slight lack of nuance and I think the critiques of corporate culture, toxic positivity within friendships and the sadness of addiction could have worked well with more subtlety. It sometimes felt like it was overdone causing the dialogue to feel forced and unnatural.

This being said, when the book was good, it was REALLY good. It definitely had an air of MYORAR to it and I found the setting of San Francisco to be a great antithesis to what was supposed to be Cassie’s ‘perfect’ life. I also loved the bits with the chef and the whole story line around him I found really sad and intriguing, especially how it ended I was really moved by these sections of the book.

The ideas I wish had just been a little more tied together, the drugs, the job, the relationship, the friends, the ideas of motherhood, the random virus thing? Sometimes felt like there was a bit too much going on. But this is definitely a book I recommend and think is going to do really well in its genre.

Thos was incredible. Heartbreaking, sharp, dark. It unflinchingly shows the reality of working in Silicon Valley, the dark truths about our capitalist society, misogyny, depression, and also touching on homelessness, abortion rights, drug addiction and suicide. It's quite a heavy read, treading the delicate line between sharp & funny and dark & sad. I found the symbolism of the pomegranate interesting but it got old by the tenth time a pomegranate was mentioned. I hoped for a bit more subtlety in the book, but it defintiely hits the spot if you're looking for a "sad girl summer" vibr book. The writing is great, I read this in two sittings but would have easily done it in one if I'd had the time!

Another sad hot girl book. Above the average, indeed. But not surprising or amazing. We've already heard that song, haven't we? And here there are good ideas (e.g. the dictionary entries introducing flashbacks from the past) and bad ideas (the virus? seriously?). Above the average, indeed. Because Sarah Rose Etter's writing is good. But the plot is weak and so are the characters orbiting around Cassie. And maybe there's too much stuff and none of that have been deeply developed.

I really enjoyed this book and the writing style. It was fast paced and i could not put it down, the ending was not my favourite and felt a little rushed.

I loved this book, really represented the society we currently live in; endless routine and false happiness. I love the main character and related to her in the sense of feeling out of place in certain settings. The writing style is amazing and it is a very interesting book to read. Highly recommend!

This trend of "young woman tries to navigate a misogynistic and capitalist world" is VERY popular at the moment. I've read four similar novels in less than a year, so why should I read your version of it over anyone else's?

This was basically the San Francisco edition of "The New Me" by Halle Butler - I didn't like Millie, Butler's MC. She was rude, abrasive, didn't have any redeeming qualities really, but at least she was a character.. Cassie, the main character of Ripe, is like a robotic dictionary, just churning out definitions to everyday words and facts about black holes. I didn't even know her name for a good third of the book.

Unfortunately, I don't know what the point of this was. What are you trying to tell me? Good points are raised throughout this, with the emotional topics of isolation and loneliness, struggles with parental figures and romantic relationships, as well as the frequent career issues of overwork and feeling pressured to go overboard for a company just because they pay you. But none of these topics ever take fruition (excuse the pun). They are laid out for Cassie to rebel against, to have that arc that she is:

a) above this, and can go apeshit on all these people demanding so much from her; or
b) succumb completely to the role of "Believer" and fall right into it.

I guess you could argue that that is in fact what she does at the end but I would disagree. The ending felt too early - we have only just reached her peak and all of a sudden the door is closed. We never actually see which path Cassie chooses.

As a reader, we are kept at arm's length from Cassie and her world the entire time; we don't know the name of her boyfriend or her CEO, we only experience her emotional state through the metaphor of a black hole, which is so constant it becomes meaningless. There are attempts at connecting with the reader, with the repeated headlines of current news, such as the virus and the California wildfires, but this is a backdrop - it serves no purpose to the novel itself. The writing is stilted, between the apathetic and factual definitions of words and the (melo)dramatic descriptions surrounding it. The scenes tackling the abortion clinic and the wavering with becoming a mother was touching, but they were too fleeting to have an overall impact. In fact, most of this book was rushed.

I really wanted to like this book - it had a lot of good ideas and incredibly relevant and universally felt thoughts, but in a sea of the same, I can't say anything sets this apart.

“Ripe” is magical! Beautiful torn prose, poetic reflections, spot-on remarks on what society expects from us.

We all carry our own black hole with us – some are shrunk to the dot on a piece of paper, some are so big you cannot see sky behind them. The protagonist Cassie’s black hole is a living breathing thing that is as part of this novel as the city of San Francisco – like Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg, San Francisco is a jewellery box filled with treasures for some, and a matchbox filled with dump matches for the others. “Ripe” is, ultimately, such a sad book, but it is elegiac in its sadness, a well-written reflection on the world we live in - centring on a tech-industry, modern culture and values in the society with ever-shifting norms, endless need to prove oneself and crazy demands of the corporate world (my god did I recognise some of the characters!).

Absolutely recommended.