JONATHAN ABERNATHY, YOU ARE KIND felt like a unique read to me - the type of genre story I maybe haven't indulged in since my teen years. It's an intriguing story, an out-there concept that piqued my interest as soon as I read the synopsis. As is sometimes the case with a slight outside-the-box concept, the plot isn't always easy to predict, and this made the story quite mysterious at times. I couldn't always follow the logic of things, but that is perhaps the point. As a whole, I felt there were messages buried inside the story about the banality of modern life, what we do to Get Through The Day, how it's just never going to be all that fair for some people who get stuck in certain situations, and as such I wouldn't call it an uplifting book. But it's definitely one that makes you think.

I managed about half of this book. But, then I have up. Nothing much really happened, the characters were all a bit unlikable. Also, I didn't like the way that the narrator told you what might have happened. If Abernathy had said x,y,a then this would have happened but it didnt.

This is a workplace novel like no other – imagine Inception meets The Office and you’ll get the idea.

Jonathan Abernathy is in his mid-twenties, saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and bouncing from one dead end job to another. He is a man going nowhere. That is until he is approached by a secretive government department which promises to solve his problems if only he will help them to solve the problems of corporate America. He finds himself hired as a dream auditor, sneaking into the dreams of white-collar workers to flag their fears and anxieties for removal to make them happier and more productive. Rather than dealing with the reasons that people are feeling fearful and anxious it’s much easier (and cheaper) to just meddle with their subconscious and make those feelings go away.

This is a novel bubbling over with inventiveness and laced throughout with a sense of ennui and existential angst. Like all the best fiction it has something important to say about the world we live in today, in this case the precarious existence of people saddled with debt, struggling to make ends meet when the world is stacked against them (“Abernathy can now spend his salary on rent, debt, or food. Though he can’t have all three, he can choose any two he likes”). It’s not all bleak though because it’s actually incredibly funny – like a stick of rock there is a dark sense of humour running through the whole thing.

It’s also incredibly well written - I read this on the Kindle and found myself highlighting something on every other ‘page’. If this is how good her debut is I’m super excited to read whatever McGhee writes next.

The plot of this book misses the mark but the writing is beautiful in places and the writer interesting and original. There are lots of ideas in the book but, for me anyway, it was a bit of a slog getting through it.

This is a very strange novel, one I appreciate the premise of and idea behind but ended up not enjoying. Some was down to the wry, direct narrator who really lacked subtley in driving the point of the book home, mixed with descriptions of surreal dreams (and non-dreams) I found hard to get straight in my head at times. I also found the tone pretty relentlessly bleak instead of finding much humour in it - much of the humour was directed towards the protagonist which was fair enough considering his character but didn't really provide any relief in the story. I thought the strength of this book came from the character development of the protagonist and the choices he makes and the way they tie in with the message - that part was really well done.

Jonathan Abernathy, man and book, are odd fishes. Both can be painfully callow, but they're  trying so very hard to be grownup and sophisticated that you have to like them at least a little. 2.5 / 5 rounded up, with hope McGhee can produce a subtler, more incisive novel in the future.

Ironically for a book foregrounding the subconscious, there's just not much subtlety or ambiguity in Abernathy. McGhee has a strong voice and merciless eye for hypocrisy, but her use of an omniscient, heavily foreshadowing narrator makes the book feel didactic. It's one thing to know Jonathan Abernathy is going to die and it's his own fault, and another to lampshade his every (glaring) failing and mistake up to the point he's finally eaten by a grue. Meanwhile, the corporate-gubmint villains practically twirl their moustaches outlining their plots, while virtually every single character we meet in the book's nameless town turns out to be already related to each other like a dreamy, downmarket Star Wars. It's all just a bit on the nose.

In keeping with its blunt plotting, Abernathy is too often filled with the righteous fury of a 20-something who has just had a student debt payment docked from their paycheck.  McGhee's targets are good ones — consumer debt in America is absolutely weaponized against 90% of the population — but it's hard to stay sympatico when the prose drifts away into reveries about how "the nature of dreaming and working is infinite, and thus incomprehensible." To be fair, that's part of an interesting point about how the tedium of labour steals time away, but psuedo-Theoretical clunkers like that litter the text. David Graeber's ideas (and fact-checking) have their own issues, but I certainly wouldn't take his prose style so much to heart. 

To the author's credit, Abernathy finally shakes off its portentiousness to offer something life-affirming and clear by the end, and many of the book's eerie, lambent dreamscapes stay with you after finishing. As much as the narration can be on poor dumb Jonathan, you also get the feeling McGhee actually cares for her creation, which is more than can be said for many clinical novels of ideas. Hopefully that empathy and insight is put to slightly gentler use in the future.

Funny, my first thought about this book was along the lines of “what a strange idea for a title”, and now that I’ve read it I’ve had so many other thoughts that the peculiar title seems almost inconsequential.

For me, ‘Jonathan Abernathy’ is one of the better stories that involve dreamwalking/dreamworlds, maybe precisely because that’s a big part of the plot but somehow not its core, especially considering we never really learn the magical mechanics involved anyway. At its core, this story feels very real and very human, crushingly so at times, with lighter moments here and there, but ultimately with lots of heartbreak: relationships fading or broken and never fixed, with goals unaccomplished and destiny coming to collect.

It becomes fairly clear early on that the reader will understand more about the situation the main character got himself into than the man himself - “government-sponsored indentured servitude” seems to sum it up pretty well, after all - and that remains true for the rest of the book, I feel. I’m not entirely sure if the author meant for Abernathy to come across as simply naive and caught up in his own thoughts and problems; at times it seemed more like him being willfully obtuse because otherwise the world around and the choices he made would have become too much to handle. Regardless, as the story unfolds, we see him hopeful, determined, confused, desperate, scared, resigned, emotional, and everything in between. It's not always 100% relatable, but it's consistently touching. And sure, it’s not a happy story, but it is a satisfying one - and with a much-needed glimpse of hope at the end, too.

'Critique of late-stage capitalism' is what really got me interested in this read. The premise had a lot of potential and at first I found the writing style really refreshing. However, I didn't end up falling in love with the book itself.

I found the main character Abernathy likeable at the start but on finishing the novel I ended up not liking him very much. I also feel like I'd missed something as It didn't exactly feel coherent to me. I'm sort of left wondering what actually happened?

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for this ARC.

Oh dear, sorry not for me. A little too weird and I had to give up before finishing. Didn't really like the tone of the writing although the author certainly has a vivid imagination!

Unique and quirky, Jonathan is a character you'll laugh with, feel embarrassed for and grow to love.

Brilliant premise and original narrative. A thoroughly entertaining read.

Wild, imaginative and actually quite terrifying when you think about it. It’s an absolute trip.

Jonathan Abernathy is a young man, unemployed and saddled with debt. He is all alone in the world. He is desperate. He receives a job opportunity, a wonderful, important job which means he can stop skipping meals. All he has to do is audit the dreams of corporate Americans. He’s getting paid to sleep! Jonathan Abernathy is kind, Jonathan Abernathy is hopeful, Jonathan Abernathy is in over his head.

This book is utterly bonkers. And I mean that as a compliment. Firstly I love the narrator, usually I hate an omniscient narrator but this worked sooo well! I read the narrator in a Helen Mirren voice from Barbie. Without the narrator there is no way the satire could have been so well portrayed. It was genius. I went on a journey with Abernathy from thinking him naive, to ridiculous, to actually just a very scared human doing his best.

It’s a very jauntily told story with a very sinister plot. If told any other way it could easily have swayed into dystopia or horror but I love the route chosen. I thought it was so clever. It doesn’t prevent any tension being built or the story getting progressively more sinister and sad.

My only two problems with this story are:
1. I found the passing of time quite hard to follow BUT I accept that as the story progresses and Abernathy gets more immersed there is necessary chaos
2. There was too much inference and not enough explaining. I appreciate that the author thinks I’m smart but some parts of this book are so out there I wanted an explanation of what it meant.

This is a brilliant work of speculative fiction. It’s a really out there story and I admire the skill and the brain behind it.

This was a fascinating read! The comp to Severance is really accurate, as it has that dreamlike state and vibe. The start of the novel was funnier and then as it progresses it gets darker, which is a parallel to Abernathy's own status on the company.

I think that Molly McGhee probably had some kind of idea of what this book was meant to be about but it might leave a lot of readers rather confused.

I understand that Jonathan is a kind of loser, sinking with accumulated debt, no sense of direction and very low self-esteem. Then, he gets a job which is meant to be the worst job you can yet, entering the dreams of white-collar workers to vacuum up their nightmares and make them better workers for the mega-corporations which employ them. Anyway, it starts off well and then goes from bad to worse as it seems that the motives of dream auditing, as it is called, are a little more sinister.

He has a potential friend in Rhoda but his lack of self confidence and feelings of worthlessness strangle that probably beneficial relationship, and there is also some problem with Rhoda’s previous partner. However, for much of the book you don’t know if that is real or happening in dreams. In fact, the whole book is rather dreamlike or possibly bad trip like which is not a lot of fun even when it is meant to be comic.

There’s a bit of redemption at the end but even that seems rather half-hearted which, in some ways, is a fair way to sum up the book. You could call it quirky or you could wonder if it had an editor, because there is an interesting idea in there somewhere – like when you have a good idea in a dream but you can’t quite remember what it was when you wake up!

Severance meets Inception in this trippy page-turner. On the whole, I loved Abernathy and his musings, his total inefficiency at life itself. I felt invested in his journey and I liked the hidden narrator. I couldn’t quite give it five stars, as at some points in the novel, it all got so abstract I was a little lost. I also felt there were some threads of the story that were never quite explained to my satisfaction. But all in all, a fantastic debut and an enjoyable read.

I found this book so unique and am excited by the discovery of Molly McGhee. It’s about the workplace but also the future and the ethics of technology, all in a way that is clever and funny and so we’ll crafted. It reminded me a bit of a play I saw recently, about a young woman who works as a content moderator for a Facebook-like company, and I think this tiny little genre niche could be big in the coming years. Jonathan is a wonderful character, one you’ll root and cringe for in equal measure. I also appreciated the list of book workers McGhee credits in the acknowledgements - I hadn’t seen that before and thought it was lovely.