Hm. I’m not quite sure what to make of this. I found some parts of it quite interesting — like, I’d love to know what the hell is up with Sarah’s arm and then her foot and then, well, that’s spoilers. And I found it quite a fast read, too. But the narration drove me a little nuts: it’s rather stream-of-consciousness, and things keep repeating, or thoughts don’t quite seem to finish. Or you get through a long paragraph and then realise it was all hypotheticals and the character has yet to act at all.

I’d love to know a bit more of the background stuff, really: Oyemi, and what was going on there; why any of these powers and people existed; what’s going on with Sarah, because that was creepy and weird and fascinating. It feels like a mash-up of superhero/sci-fi tropes that doesn’t quite go anywhere, leaving you not even knowing which side to pick. It was fun enough to read, but at the end, I’m left staring a bit blankly, and I don’t think I could really explain why any of it happened. It just… peters out, boom, the end. I don’t get it.

This was a bit too clunky with the back and forth of the timeline however, there are a lot of similarities to Rook that will appeal to other readers.

I really wanted to like this book. I loved the blurb, it sounded fun and different and little off the wall. When it came to reading it I just couldn't get into it at all - so it may well have been all those things but I'm afraid I didn't find out. After struggling through the first chapter I gave up.

I think others will enjoy this and I plan on purchasing a copy for the library but I'm afraid the writing style didn't jell for me at all.

I dnf'd the book at 33%. I tried really hard to get into the story but every few pages I found myself thinking of something else or falling asleep. The book is well written and the plot is captivating, just not the kind of captivating that works for me. I struggled to get through the chapters, too much past and present, often confusing, and after dragging it for so long I decided to stop reading altogether. I'm really sorry the book didn't work for me. It should have but unfortunately it didn.t. Thanks for giving me the arc, though. I appreciate the opportunity to give my opinion even if not positive.

Manuel Gonzales’ The Regional Office is Under Attack! is exactly what it says on the tin. The action, which takes place in breathless present-tense chapters, covers the events of the attack on the Regional Office, while the backstory inevitably pointing towards its fall is conveyed by academic article.

The Regional Office is, on the surface of things, an upmarket travel agency in New York, at which work some very ordinary New Yorkers. However, the truth lies underground: the floors below street level are the headquarters for a a shadowy organisation which trains and dispatches young women with extraordinary talents to fight multifarious intra- and extra-dimensional threats to the safety of the planet.

Despite being a bit of a chunk at 307 pages, it’s a bloody fast read, due to its action movie-quick pace. Not only that, the voice is never not clever and contemporary. It references Die Hard as characters abseil through air ducts, and Terminator when a character thinks about her mechanical arm. (There’s a character with a mechanical arm. Keep an eye out for her.)

The dichotomy that powers the novel is that between the ordinary and the extraordinary. The frisson between the banality of office life and the superlatively glamorous and exciting business of deadly, magical agents saving the world every day is the central conceit, but also the distance being or becoming out-of-the-ordinary puts between people and the world around them, and the attempt to close that gap again when you are who you are. How to be in the world when you can see the future, or crush someone’s skull in your hand, or simply have power over other people’s lives.

The threads that join this story together are, as a result, for the very most part dysfunctional. That is, dysfunctional in the way that real relationships are, but writ large. The wrongs that people commit against one another are the bread and butter of the plot of the novel. Ultimately, as expressed in a central moment, the instigating factor always turns out to be love, and, in acting, the catalyst is destroyed. This too-recognisable theme hums under the pacy adventure plot, anchoring the delightful whimsy of these super-powered women heroes in real emotion.

Enough with my necessary vagueness. To sum up, The Regional Office is Under Attack! is a heart-pounding, adrenaline-quick action novel in a self-consciously intelligent and yet irresistible voice. It’ll stick in my mind for some time.

Extremely clever and entertaining, some wonderfully sly humour and a story line that will keep you guessing.
Female superheroes, robotic limbs and pool dwelling oracles, this book has them all.
I really enjoyed this and will be recommending to everyone.

I really enjoyed this book, both it's style of prose and the story it told. The Regional Office of the title is an organisation populated by super-powered females who save the world from the forces of darkness and the attack of the title takes place throughout the novel. We focus on two characters, Sarah, who may or may not have a mechanical arm, and Rose, a recently trained super-soldier with a bad attitude and a crush on her boss. The book is arranged so that alternate chapters tell us about the past of our characters and what is happening present day and while this does take a little bit of getting used to, I think it works well to round out the story of the Regional Office. Interspersed are passages from an academic paper telling the history of the Regional Office, which again make the world all the more rich. What I found most impressive was the author's ability to juggle all of these different styles and keep them (mostly) up in the air. The story was fun but there is real emotional depth there too and although this won't be a book that everyone will enjoy, I certainly did.

This is an interesting novel, it is highly stylised.
It feels different the idea of a world of magic, assassins but in a literary fiction setting works.
It feels possibly too long but there is a humour and the writer retains his concept and style throughout which works and avoids anyone feeling bored.

The Regional Office is under armed attack. It would be like a scene straight out of Die Hard except no one seems to know for sure who the bad guys are or who the good guys are or if this attack is real or just another training exercise. Most of the world thinks the Regional Office is a specialized travel agency for the very wealthy. Very few realize that the travel agency is just a cover. What is known for sure is told in alternating view points from two different girls who work in the Office, Rose and Sarah. Both are in the middle of the action and mayhem in the present, and their back stories are told in alternating chapters. Until eventually readers may get an idea of what the Regional Office is and what prompted the attack.

I had been really looking forward to reading this. I’d heard a lot of good buzz saying this was a hilarious Die Hard-like novel. And while I did like the action elements and the nods to various semi-obscure sci-fi movies and shows – and of course, Die Hard comparisons - it didn’t live up to the hype I’d built in my mind. Maybe that’s the fault of my own mind building up so much excitement. I didn’t find it nearly as funny as some others seemed to which was the biggest bummer. I don’t remember laughing out loud once. I was quite satisfied with all of the obscure sci-fi references. Those were great. And it gets plenty of points for taking a well done genre trope – superhero training – and making it feel different from anything DC or Marvel has out there. So where did it fall short of the hype? Well, maybe part of my disappointment was that I found Rose’s mouth was so foul it might even make John McClane blush. It certainly didn’t help the flow of her section and made it sometimes hard to follow what was going on. (Seriously, there are some stretches of her chapters where almost every other word would have to be bleeped out if she were on mainstream TV.) The book also takes a fair amount of concentration to read with all the back and forth in time and switching narrators. I’m not saying it is necessarily bad for an author to take a creative way to string out the action. This layout does help you get a slow reveal for what is going on, which I can appreciate. If you like the movie Momento you should like this format. That said, it might have been a little bit better of a read if the author had just done one scene of the attack and done the rest as flashback. Or done the flashbacks in bigger sections with less back and forth. Oh, and just stick to Sarah (because frankly I found her the most interesting of the characters…not a little bit due to her semi-sentient robotic arm…FREAKY ARM!!!). So overall, I felt like it could have been a fun, high octane read but a few choices in how this was done took away some of that fun and made it a mediocre read. That said, I’d like to see this adapted into a movie because I think the fun would be maximized and the detractors minimized for that format.

I absolutely adored the beginning of this book - I think I spent the first 100 pages with a huge grin on my face. I just totally loved the language, the vibe, the world created, and the characters at the centre of the story. But while I think it was a brilliant book, the ending did kind of fizzle out - although I reckon that was on purpose.

The book chronicles the rise and fall of the Regional Office - a private institution created to protct the world from all sorts of dangers - while focussing on two women on opposing sides of the conflict. Rose is leading the charge on the Regional Office, while Sarah (and her mechanical arm) are trying to protect it.

One of the biggest strength were the two main characters. I had an absolute blast spending time in Rose's head - she is 17 and obnoxious and funny and so in over her head. She thinks she has it all figured out, when really she so doesn't. I love the run-on sentences Manuel Gonzales uses to show what her thought processes are like and her voice is hilarious. Sarah is a bit more difficult to like - her colleagues all hate or fear her, but she grew on me. The excessive use of the term "mechanical arm" made me crack up and made that thing feel like a character in its own right.
Both Rose and Sarah were great and different from each other and then not so different at all.

I adored the style Manuel Gonzales chose to tell this story, with asides and non-sequitors and sentences that go nowhere. While the story was maybe a bit weak and a little superficial, the language was enough to keep me glued to the page. I would not have minded had the book been longer and some of the backstory extended - you cannot tell me about the existence of transdimensional monsters and then never talk about them again! I want to see that! - but I still found this to be a great book to spend time with.

Somewhere in here is a really, really good book but it seems to always stumble at the final hurdle. The story goes back and forth in time and is split between two narrators. Rose, who is attacking the Regional Office and Sarah, who is defending it. Their voices are fairly interchangeable, angry loners with a rebellious streak, which makes a complicated plot and structure all the more difficult to follow at times as the timeline zips back and forth between past and present. The premise is a fascinating one and I love the idea of the group of female assassins hidden away in the bowels of an office building, but there's just that bit too much going on. The tv show Legion is a recent example of how to brilliantly make a complex plot understandable will retaining the weirdness and this book did remind me a little of that at times. I admire the ambition and would love to see this brought to the screen but it falls just that little bit short for me this time.

I received a free ARC from Netgalley in exchange for a fair review.

So, I got this as an eARC because female assassins? Yes please! Unfortunately, I was not a huge fan of this book as I felt it focused far too much on action and not enough on the characters themselves. I would have enjoyed seeing more training and more interpersonal relationships but, as seen in the name, it mostly focuses on the attack.

The book focuses between two POV characters - Rose who is one of the attackers and Sarah who is one of the defenders. It shows the history of both characters and how they ended up in the positions they are in, then the outcome of the attack. Interspersed through this are comments from a fictional book detailing the downfall of the regional office. I really enjoyed these sections and felt they were definitely the best parts of the novel as although it was fun reading about Rose sneaking down to infiltrate the office, there wasn't much depth to it. I feel this is a novel that would work much better as a film because of all the action scenes. I was also not a fan of most of the characters in charge - they were very manipulative of the young women, using them for their own purposes. The book also felt a bit too long - if it had been shorter I probably wouldn't have minded as much and just viewed it as a quick, fun read but unfortunately it was a bit too long for that at over 400 pages.

I'm not sure that if I ran a top secret agency that recruited super powered young women and sent them into battle against the forces of evil I would call it The Regional Office. Hidden in the bowels of a building in New York, safe beneath a cover company offering one of a kind travel experiences for the extremely wealthy, the Regional Office has been fighting the good fight for years. If this set up sounds like a mash-up of several books and TV series (Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets The Office meets Agents Of SHIELD meets Minority Report) that is all part of Manuel Gonzales’ plan.

Gonzales and his characters are well aware of their fictional antecedents (at one point a character considers going “all John McLane” to fight off the invaders while her opposite number is thinking the same thing as she drags herself through a vent system). This referencing of pop culture touchstones allows Gonzales to give a cinematic quality to the narrative. When powered teen Rose swings her hand around her head to indicate to her goons that it is time to roll out, she does it because that is what she has seen in the movies, while we movie watchers can picture the move exactly.

There is some gallows humour to be had when ordinary office workers are caught in a supernatural showdown, but it feels forced, particularly as they are beaten down for trying to escape or picked off one by one.

But there is also some serious intent here played out through the two main characters. On one side is Hannah who does not have superpowers but has been adopted into the Regional Office and fitted with a robotic arm to help her avenge the disappearance of her mother. And on the other is Rose a super powered teen recruited away from a small, dead-end town. Both are outsiders who have to navigate difficult social situations and both have to fall back on pop cultural touch points (like Mean Girls) to help them navigate.

The Regional Office is Under Attack is a strange hybrid and like many hybrids is only partially successful. As a satire it does not quite hit the mark, the juxtaposition of office work versus saving the world work does not get well enough developed to really appreciate how it all goes to hell when under pressure. But as an action thriller with a bit of heart and plenty of homage paid to its forebears, it works. The action is intense, the cliffhangers are well handled and the twists, while telegraphed a little too early are well played. So that overall this is a fun read, particularly for scifi fans who are in need of a Buffy/Die Hard/Mean Girls/Minority Report/Terminator fix.

The confident and witty voice held me for a good long while but I simply did not figure out what was going on for nearly a third of the book - and then the kick ass young woman, troubled in her assessments, seemed derivative in a way. It could simply be that YA is not for me and it is not quite what I expected here. The central figure is attractive and quixotic, a 'bad' girl, playing with fire but rescued or else recruited to a mission that she takes seriously despite her ways. I think this would be immensely enjoyable for a young person to read. I'm not young.