Navigating NYC as a recent graduate while searching for your first job within your career (and that doesn't include being a nanny) and a decent apartment in this day and age is certainly not an easy feat. I must give Elinor, the main character, credit because she is able to do all of this on her own without reaching out to her parents for help. That is a huge difference between the current 20-somethings I know and love and for that reason, Elinor is a decent role model.

When looking on Amazon for a description of this book, I noted that it is listed under Humor and Satire. I suppose that is important to note because it doesn't come across extremely well while reading it. Even though I knew what the story was about, I couldn't help but get extremely frustrated by the dialogue and inner monologue. Is this really how millennials think? I know that this does mimic normalcy in conversations but definitely with an added exaggeration. I think, I hope.

As much as I was frustrated with this writing style, I did however finish the whole book. Did I like it? Not entirely. But I do appreciate what the author was trying to portray. Maybe it is just meant for a different genre to read.

I found Sociable to be a similar reading experience to Peneleope, Harrington's debut. Which is to say, the potentially interesting details of the plot are bogged down by questionable writing habits, such as a refusal to use contractions, award beyond awkward dialogue, broad archetypal characters, a passive and mopey heroine with little to say about her situation, and the overuse of certain words to the extent that you can only assume it's intentional for some reason. It really does take away from the reading experience. It took a couple of chapters in Penelope for these to really start grating, but in Sociable it started right away. Some may enjoy but I couldn't recommend.

Who doesn’t love a hilarious story about a self-unaware Millennial trying to ‘make it’ in the big city? Elinor, a twenty-something-year-old graduate, has finally said goodbye to being a nanny and landed a journalistic job at a start-up. She gets to drink bad coffee, write quick pieces and make sense of her life. However, writing viral content isn’t the job she dreamed of and her personal life soon spins out of control. The measured, cool and collected person she’s trying to portray on the social media is… well, not really her. Surprise, surprise anyone?

Once I’ve started reading the novel, honestly, I couldn’t put it down. I finished it over the weekend. There’s something mesmerizing about self-centered characters — you laugh with them and often at them. Everything rings, oh, so close to the reality that it makes you think between the crisp lines. Kind of funny, kind of sad, but also very true. Start-ups and websites, Instagram and Twitter, hashtags and filters. We all want to be the bigger, better person, but are we really? And why do we care what version of us we are curating to the world?

Rebecca Harrington offers a charmingly sympathetic and satirical look at Elinor and her endeavors in the working world, unhealthy romantic relationships and worrisome friendships or simply 21st century adulthood. The writing is flowing down the pages in such a perceptible and sharp manner that carries you to the next sentence with ease and talent. At the end you just can’t close the book without a laugh escaping your lips.

It’s contemporary fiction that knows what it’s doing and it’s not making excuses. Highly recommended… unless you tend to take yourself a bit too seriously.

I have kindly received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley and Doubleday Books in exchange of a fair review.

I really wanted to like this book after one of my favorite authors recommended it, but I couldn't make it the whole way through-- which is super unusual for me. Everyone was just so unlikable. And the writing felt stilted, I just couldn't get into the flow.

I received this book as an ARC from Netgalley in return for an honest review. (My first - thanks!)

I had so many confusing emotions about this book. I am not sure if this is because I was unclear on the aim of the book. Was it satire? Was it serious? Was it both? I feel like it was both.

I saw a lot of myself and friends in parts of the characters. But, at other times it did feel a little bit overdone. The main character reminded me a lot of Shoshanna from Girls - Her character was great in the show but it would have been overkill if all of the characters were like her. This is what I felt in this book. However, I️ still enjoyed it because of my love for nyc and the mirroring of many aspects of the millennial lifestyle. Social media has completely overrun our lives and we have a tendency to care too much about ourselves, leading us to be self centered and rude to others. Maybe my dislike stemmed from some of the novel hitting too close to home. Is it possible I am that self-absorbed and short sighted?

In the end this was a smooth and easy read that was overall very fun loving.

More complex than meets the eye, this novel is a look at the world of social media and how it has impacted the way that we interact with each other. More importantly, it highlights the way in which social media and media reporting can influence our self-perception. 
Elinor, a struggling journalist, is completely absorbed in her screen and the feedback that she gets from social media. As she suffers through a breakup and navigates a new job for an online organization, we are carried through her ups, downs and constant questioning of herself. The more positive media attention, the more positively she feels and the more validating her beliefs, even when she is a little off base. Face-to-face with actual people, she feigns self-confidence as she questions every move until it is validated 'socially'. 
This book is well written and, when taken in the context of our increasing reliance on social media, a reminder for us to interact with actual people and rely less on media to provide our support and to look to who we are. 
I particularly enjoyed the ending....while abrupt, it again demonstrates the fickle nature of life online and how it may transfer to our 'real' relationships.

“But, as all of the quotes about writing did say, it is a vulnerable business, and Elinor felt suddenly exposed.”

With a journalism degree and solid career goals, Elinor Tomlinson moves to New York City where she lives with her moderately successful boyfriend. She struggles to find her place in the fast-paced world of digital journalism until she’s offered a job at Journalism.ly, a Buzzfeed-ish office, where her content goes viral.

Following a simple, yet fun premise, I thought “Sociable” was going to be a lighthearted read, but I never really connected with the characters. When there was an opportunity for fun dialogue, you could see a glimmer of what “Sociable” could have been. Instead, it just falls a bit flat.

“In a culture that celebrates lifelong loves and soulmates and being chosen, what do you do when you’re rejected and left?”

The book is slow, but it does find its purpose near the end. I love books about the world of journalism, but unfortunately, there was just so much untapped possibility with “Sociable.”

But here’s a tip from Harrington that many can benefit from: “You can’t report something just because it’s on Twitter.”

I read Rebecca Harrington’s upcoming novel Sociable on a Saturday morning, after spending my Friday night in a bar where a young man found out that I’m an English teacher, and proceeded to mansplain the use of the possessive apostrophe to me, but he was drunk and forgot the word for apostrophe, and I’m still laughing about it. Also, I’m about 10 years older than he realized, so, all in all, not this guy’s night.

I mention this not only to have another laugh at this poor guy’s expense, but to highlight the frustrating inanities of small talk. And Sociable describes these inanities perfectly.

When a guy tells Elinor, I bet you’re one of those girls who loves her phone! it’s a strange setup for her to prove that she doesn’t love her frivolous phone, she devotes her time to Important (male-approved) Things. Later, Elinor attempts to make the meaningful party contacts, the sort of job offers and suggestions that come easily to her connected boyfriend, and again, Sociable accurately describes party smalltalk inanities.

And that’s how Sociable sets up the distinction between Will’s writing career, which is long, political thinkpieces at a job handed to him by his parents’ friends, and Elinor’s, which is listicles by the hour at startup Journalism.ly. Sociable also describes the daily vagueness of working in an office without a traditional hierarchy or without job titles with any meaningful distinctions. Who am I supposed to report to? How often? What I am even supposed to do all day? There are a few adults at Journalism.ly, either riding the wave of advertising on 24/7 viral output or wandering around wondering what happened to print journalism, but the staff is mostly twenty-something would-be novelists, churning out listicles and advertainment.

Sociable is a twenty-something -in -the -city story, but there’s no cute, character-filled apartment or handsome stranger in the local independent coffeeshop. Instead, it’s the authentic awkwardness of being half-remembered by a more successful college classmate, having a post-breakup meetup that may actually be a job search, and being kinda good at the internet writing thing.

I found Elinor hard to root for or relate to. She is whiny in the worst ways for a character to be, especially a millennial. She has all our worst qualities without any of the pluses of our generation. She has worked her way to poverty with a lame boyfriend and is broken hearted when it doesn't work out. I hoped this would cause more growth, and it does but not as much as I was hoping for. Since I found Elinor vapid and a little ignorant, especially about her field of study I didn't care to see her succeed or find love. This is a quick easy read with a few enjoyable parts but on the whole doesn't make me want anything more from these people.

This book is hilarious. The people in this book are all self obsessed, terrible, horribly annoying people. I laughed out loud constantly. I would never want to be friends with any of these people. It’s pretty much a book making fun of millennials so if you are one just be warned. I thought it was very funny.

I received this book from NetGalley and Doubleday Books in exchange for my honest review.

Oh, I wish I had something nice to say about this book but it really didn't have any redeeming qualities.

Every character was painfully unlikable. They were all whiney and self centered and would get mad at all the other self centered people. The word "Like" was over used, like so much. It was pitched as a book with humor but I never found it. Feminism is brought up serval times but they never really seem to understand what it means to be a feminist. You can tell that Elinor and Mark want to be feminist but they just can't get it. Is that what is supposed to be funny??? Eh...

The "To the reader" portions of the book felt very unnatural, like an afterthought. Oh hey, by the way, this is why Elinor is acting this way because otherwise it wouldn't makes sense. :/

The plot never really went anywhere. I kept hoping that something, anything would happen to make it interesting. It really could have been a lot better if something would have happened.

Elinor is a journalism major who moves to NYC after college with the intent of making a name for herself in Journalism. Elinor has an idiot boyfriend, a shitty apartment and a shitty personality. Elinor manages to get a job at at one of those websites that put out those annoying clickbait posts you see on social media all the time. Elinor hates her job. Elinor's boyfriend breaks up with her. Elinor moves to another shitty apartment and hangs out with her equally shitty friends. Depressing, no? Like many others, I hate giving negative input but this really missed the mark for me. First off, the ending made me a little crazy. The story just randomly....stops. No explanations, conclusions, resolution. No anything. Second, I really just felt like the story itself fell short. When I started reading this, my initial thought was that I hated all the main characters and how shallow they were. When I realized this was intended to be more satirical, I started to enjoy the story line a little more. In spite of this, I still feel like the author missed a lot of potential here. This could have been an insightful story about how social media affects our lives and relationships, but instead it was just kind of snarky for no reason.

I am going to try to not make this a bash fest as there were some things I did like about this book but those things do not outweigh the bad.

First, a quick synopsis:
Elinor Tomlinson moved to New York with a degree in journalism. She had visions of writing witty opinion pieces, marrying her journalist boyfriend, and attending parties with famous writers. Instead, Elinor finds herself nannying for two kids, sleeping on a foam pad in a small apartment, and attending terrible parties with interns wearing smocks. So when Elinor is offered a job at Journalism.ly, the digital media brainchild of a Silicon Valley dude, she jumps at the chance. Her boyfriend, Mike, is writing long think pieces about the electoral college for a "real" website while she writes lists about sneakers and coffee. But Elinor soon discovers her true gift: She has the ability for writing viral content. But her success at writing does not fix the other problems in her life. Elinor's boyfriend dumps her, two male colleagues insist on "mentoring" her, and a piece she writes about her personal life lands her on local television. Broke, single, and consigned to move to a fifth-floor walk-up where she has to share a bathroom with an older woman, Elinor must ask herself: Is this the creative life she dreamed of?

As I read Sociable by Rebecca Harrington, I was waiting for the main character, Elinor, to change in some way, to become self-aware, to become stronger, or have some semblance of a backbone but it never happened. I found zero character development. I kept waiting for Elinor to tell her ex-boyfriend off, or to yell at her "mentors" that she didn't need their help, she was doing just fine on her own. But none of this happened. I just saw Elinor go from home to work to other events, never changing and nothing too exciting or terrible happening to her.

Now, I am not one of those people who needs to fall in love with a protagonist to love a book but Elinor is on another level for me. She is insufferable. She is a more passive version of Lena Dunham's Hannah from Girls. The fact that there is no climax (If you can point out one to me, please do!) and no character development just further emphasizes her awfulness. She is annoying and immature (even for her age). I am around the same age as Elinor and I could never stand to have her as a friend. Her doubt and her, at times, bizarre thought process is difficult to connect to or understand. She needs to be likeable or relatable in some way for a reader to stay interested in her story. I felt no empathy for her whatsoever. She was blind to her privilege even when it was pointed out to her. In one part of the book, Elinor writes a piece about how women shouldn't feel forced to write about their break-ups. Is that a thing? Do women writers feel like they need to write about every break-up they've ever had or is this just another part of her odd thinking? Either way, telling women not to write ends up biting her in the ass.

But let's not pile on Elinor. Her ex-boyfriend, Mike is (for lack of a better word) a monster. Holy shit. He is emotionally abusive and manipulative towards Elinor. He makes her feel bad and blame herself for things he did. He is also a pretentious prick who, I have no doubt, actually exists in the journalism world. He certainly exists in the writing world. Oh lord is the writing world filled with pretentious pricks. I was happy for Elinor when Mike broke up with her despite how awful she felt about it.

Elinor's personality and her behavior could be explained by the patterns of abuse that Mike perpetrated on her. They had been together since college so she had been dealing with his bullshit for a while. But that doesn't explain away the lack of character development or the lack of story. The break up doesn't change Elinor. Her new job at Journalism.ly doesn't change her. Her new shitty living conditions don't change her. Elinor doesn't become a better human. Mike gets laid off from his "important" journalism job but Elinor doesn't get much satisfaction from it so neither does the reader. I don't believe I am being hyperbolic when I say that there is no character development in this book. And it's not just Elinor, none of the characters in this book develop or change from who they were at the beginning. Additionally, nothing really happens in the book. Elinor goes to a party or two, goes to work, and has a few dust-ups with Mike and her best friend, Sheila. The story could be graphed as a straight line from start to finish with a few bumps in between.

There are also these weird, drop-in chapters where the point of view changes from Elinor to J.W, one of Elinor's self-appointed "mentors". These sections seem out of place and ultimately don't add anything to the story.

The one thing I did appreciate was Elinor's ability to write viral and fun pieces (I kind of wish they were shown in the book). She was steadfast in her knowledge that what she wrote was good despite what anyone said. She may not have been confident in many other aspects of her life but she was in the pieces she wrote for Journalism.ly. I love a woman writer who knows her worth. I also enjoyed how Elinor and Sheila's friendship ended up. They might have been shitty to each other at times but they were ultimately there for one another in the end.

Overall, I think Sociable is trying to show millennial life in New York City, the world of start-ups and journalism but the characters came off as stereotypical of what millennials are supposed to be, not what they actually are. I wanted to relate to Elinor, to find something about her that I could connect to. I wanted her to be the thing that would connect me to the story being told, but it just never happened. Nothing really ever happened.

Thank you, NetGalley and Doubleday books for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The book looked like it would be a commentary on how the millennial generation is addicted to social media and viral content. But this was not it. It was about a judgmental insufferable woman who is obsessed about her disrespectful boyfriend who just dumped her for no reason. Most of the other characters are also quite unlikable with hardly any redeeming qualities. I was able to get through the book but it just ended abruptly and I thought nothing was really resolved. Millennials are shown in a very bad light here and I really thought that was gross generalization and unfair to people like me. The friendships were superficial and sometimes downright bitchy which I just hated. I really don’t think our generation is so incapable of friendships and relationships as depicted here and even though we might be a little social media obsessed, it doesn’t mean we can be insulted. I was really disappointed with this book.

Review copy provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. No, I didn't like this at all. I can't really say anything without saying something bad.

I spend a lot of time wondering about other people’s lives, comparing them to my own and trying to come up with a sense of what their internal dialogue might be like. In NYC, there is a seemingly endless supply of people across all backgrounds to make observations and speculations. This novel does just that for the millennial set, those who work at news/journalism startups at a time when no one knows what that means. I think one of the oddest things about life in a big cities now is how easy it is to become endlessly self-involved, to relentlessly question your role in your own life compared to others, to present an image of yourself that no one can really live up to. I find novels like this fascinating- a way to explore my incessant nosiness into how others live their lives.

Well, I’m disappointed that I just didn’t like this book at all. I kept reading because I love humorous stories and stories about social media but this book was depressing, the characters unlikeable. Two stars because I was able to read it quickly.

Sociable
by Rebecca Harrington (Goodreads Author)
108416
Nancy Cunningham's review Sep 23, 2017 · edit
it was ok
bookshelves: netgalley

Those of us who were born in the 20th Century (particularly before the last decade of the last Century) will probably approach this book in a different manner than Millennial readers. Initially, I was tempted to put SOCIABLE aside, thinking I am just the wrong demographic for this story. . . . then, I decided to try to embrace it as a tool to understanding the social norms of the .com generation.

I am not sure I ever succeeded in embracing the characters or the story, but I certainly gained some understanding and empathy for the "coming of age" struggles for today's well-educated, aspiring professionals . I totally empathized with the ghastly work environment of the narrator and winced every time she posted something chirpy on social media in an attempt to spin a ghastly situation into a positive one. The book may have been written tongue in cheek, but it doesn't take an over-active imagination to translate the satiric world of this novel into a rather grim contemporary reality.

My negative reaction to the book was no doubt primarily a generational divide, but I also found it lacking in soul or substance. It may be naive to look for a happy ending in a dystopian tale, but I was looking for either professional growth, character development, or blind luck to enter the equation. I was disappointed.

NET GALLEY provided me with a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Oof.

I take no pleasure in bashing books at all, but this was just….not good. In fact, if it wasn’t such a short and easy read, I’m not sure I could have made it all the way through. I'm not sure if this was the entire point of the narrative, but the characters were so unlikable to the point of being painful. I get making a point or over-exaggerating the stereotype of the millennial but there were points when even the way they spoke (If they started one more sentence with “Like” or ended a statement with a question mark, I was going to lose it) was terribly childish and annoying. The story meandered around without really going anywhere or bringing about any sort of resolution...and the ending was abrupt with no lessons learned and no growth achieved.