– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
To be published by Little, Brown and Company on 25 Apr 2017
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Mack McAllister has a $600 million dollar idea. His mindfulness app, TakeOff, is already the hottest thing in tech and he’s about to launch a new and improved version that promises to bring investors running and may turn his brainchild into a $1 billion dollar business–in startup parlance, an elusive unicorn.
Katya Pasternack is hungry for a scoop that will drive traffic. An ambitious young journalist at a gossipy tech blog, Katya knows that she needs more than another PR friendly puff piece to make her the go-to byline for industry news.
Sabrina Choe Blum just wants to stay afloat. The exhausted mother of two and failed creative writer is trying to escape from her credit card debt and an inattentive husband-who also happens to be Katya’s boss-as she rejoins a work force that has gotten younger, hipper, and much more computer literate since she’s been away.
Before the ink on Mack’s latest round of funding is dry, an errant text message hints that he may be working a bit too closely for comfort with a young social media manager in his office. When Mack’s bad behavior collides with Katya’s search for a salacious post, Sabrina gets caught in the middle as TakeOff goes viral for all the wrong reasons. As the fallout from Mack’s scandal engulfs the lower Manhattan office building where all three work, it’s up to Katya and Sabrina to write the story the men in their lives would prefer remain untold.
I chose this book because…
I’m interested in this book for the same reason I was interested in the TV show Silicon Valley. As a woman in tech and in search of a job, tech startups and corporations alike are of interest to me. Of course, this book is a work of fiction and I’m not doing going to do any research with it, but I am going to enjoy living through the working hard and playing hard, the glitz and glam, the highs and lows, without any of the consequences. Also, all that about “mindfulness apps,” “driving traffic,” and “viral”-ity is certainly relevant and is stuff I’ve noticed myself in this online world!
Upon reading it…
I thought this would be a quick, fluffy, YA-like read, and whilst it was a quick read for me, it didn’t feel fluffy or YA-like (YA-like, like where I’ll often find myself rolling my eyes and thinking omg this is so trivial, you’re being so dramatic and self-centered). I identified a lot with the young characters, and/or the young characters the older characters saw. The book pinpointed things I didn’t realise that I expected of and/or wanted from a workplace, and I found that especially in this quote:
“Mack thought he did a pretty good job of realizing when people were unhappy, and he did everything he could to prevent that. It was of course important that you felt fulfilled at work and felt like you had a good work-life balance. But the way people, Mack included, worked now, work was life. They expected their work to be fun and their fun to be work, and they didn’t differentiate between ‘work friends’ and ‘real friends’; they assumed that the way things had been in college was the way things were in real life.”
As a woman in tech studying at a women’s college, I am definitely aware of topics like racism and sexism in the workplace, and I found those topics in this book, and even the topic of ageism to a certain extent as well, which I think makes the story in this book feel more real. But what I liked most about how this book dealt with these topics is that it didn’t say them outright or get too preachy preachy. It dealt with these topics like how I might experience and deal with them. Unfortunately, cases of racism and sexism are far too frequent, and it is exhausting to get riled up about them every time. Unfortunately, they’re things we’ve gotten used to having to deal with. Unfortunately, we sometimes don’t even notice that they’re out of the ordinary. We might make a comment to acknowledge it, but then we move on because we have things we need to get done, the risks are more than we can afford, and/or the power structure doesn’t give us very many options.
Overall, I found this book exciting (as I anticipate my future career) and real. Not only that, but it also made me rethink my ideals and expectations of the workplace and what kind of impact I want to make in the technological world and also in general.
★★★★☆
If you like this book, you might like…
My Not So Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella, The Art of Living Other People’s Lives by Greg Dybec
The two most important things anyone needed for success were vision and willpower.
But wasn’t the struggle part of the point? What did you have to strive for if everything was easy?
Katya rarely watched TV except when Victor was over, and she had never really understood the appeal of getting “into” a show. And people who said that they watched shows ironically or as “guilty pleasures” she understood even less. Life was short. Why waste it on something that made you feel like you had to explain yourself?
She remembered that she used to think that if she wasn’t exactly destined for greatness, she was definitely at least destined for significance.
Couldn’t thirty-nine-year-olds just be old and tired and not talk about it constantly?
A side hustle, when you were thirty-six, was just a second job.
Life was a series of tradeoffs.
Now it seemed like these guys had all gone to the same school of “call women crazy whenever they do something that makes you uncomfortable.”
Like, why do we need something telling us how to cheer up, as though man’s preferred state of being at all times is to be cheerful so that you can do better work or be a better you. It’s like they can’t imagine a world where people have actual emotions or feel sad or angry or frustrated; everything has to be fixed immediately.