Being in the IT company where 80% of workforce is men, I hope more books like this (depicting girls/women climbing the corporate ladder to the top) would come out.

This is a great book and a fun read! Terwilliger's ability to create characters and relationships that are hilarious, relatable, crazy, and endearing is impressive. Her descriptive and beautifully written prose transports the reader into Halley's world, thus experiencing all of the humor, woes, and travels of the protagonist. Be warned: The author's delicious descriptions of food will make you hungry!

This literary fiction was captivating. Halley and Celeste were ruthless in their attempts to get to the top. It really says something about how far people will go to get what they want. I really enjoyed this story and was on the edge of my seat throughout. I will be looking for more from Terwillinger in the future.

Halley Faust works at Findlay in a dead-end job. She wants to move up, prove her value to the company and get a more exciting job and therefore life. This chance comes when a competition for a promotion comes. She will be competing with a few other coworkers in Dayton, Ohion. The promotion involves moving to France to help promote a new product, Tantalus. Halley gets it and moves to France but everything isn’t what she dreamed it would be.

The novel is a satire of corporations and the general rat race most people experience. As a cog at the bottom of the totem pole Halley is overlooked, overworked yet invaluable to the daily operations of the company. In France she is asked to do everyday tasks to keep everything “running smoothly.” Although most people overlook what she does the higher ups would be useless without her as they are incapable of performing some of the most basic tasks (like checking into a hotel or making reservations).

The novel had some funny and sad moments. One of my favorite scenes was when Halley goes to a lot of trouble to mail wine to Ohio for a promotional idea just to have it get cancelled. To me this illustrates exactly what managers and higher ups are like. They are used to twirling their fingers and having things happen without putting any thought into it.

The characters were great, Halley was given great depth and emotion. I loved all the backstabbing and betrayals everyone does to each other. From sleeping around, to sending incriminating emails to your boss to get someone fired, to sabotaging a colleague’s works. I really didn’t like Rousseau though, as a love interest he was super bland and unlikeable. I really wasn’t sure what the purpose of him in the novel was.

In summary this was a great satirical novel about corporations and being a cog in the machine. I loved the ending as it was nice to see everyone get what they deserved, felt bad for the cat though.

Thank you to Netgalley and Amberjack Publishing for this ARC.

If there ever were a perfect time to lament the futility of advancing from support-level jobs, now is the time to publish that story. Middle-class millennials were told that going to four year colleges would secure them steady careers, but as the decades have worn on, all it has guaranteed is tens of thousands of dollars of debt that is getting increasingly difficult to pay off.

Brittany Terwilliger’s "The Insatiables" may have been written as a satire about corporations, but its perspective of an entry level protagonist feels startlingly true to life. Halley Faust wants a life that expands outside of her Dayton, Ohio, upbringing, a
desire her family tries to chastise her out of wanting. She has a job; why doesn’t she want to settle down like her sister? Why
does she think she’s better than her relatives who came before her? It does not take an English major to figure out that Halley’s pursuit of a promotion is no better than a deal with the devil.

The story begins with Halley and her best friend Celeste in the trenches of office politics. This is best summed up with the
catch-22, “As Service Staff, you were supposed to keep events like this running smoothly. But you had no authority to do
it.” Terwilliger spins comical details that will feel familiar to anyone who has ever worked in a cubicle. There are bosses sulking over everything from coffee machines to grand entrances on hang gliders. There are petty squabbles about choice assignments and getting recognized for hours spent on menial tasks. There are rumors about the special accommodations made for certain higher-ups during company conferences. Terwilliger will make readers want to laugh to keep from crying, or at least turn to someone and say, “Can you believe this guy?”

But the good will and camaraderie between Halley and Celeste are quickly set aside when their boss announces that they
will be competing for the same promotion (and subsequent relocation to Paris). Before she even realizes she’s doing it, Halley betrays Celeste, altering the course of both of their lives forever. Though Halley receives the promotion that she had
never thought possible, she finds that her work in France is just as frustrating. Readers will feel the impossibility of Halley’s task as she tries to help launch a product appropriately called the Tantalus. The completion of this project feels continuously
out of reach as the rest of her team is seduced by the French countryside and fails to complete its share of the work.

Suddenly, everything Halley has ever wanted is no longer enough. She wants to get promoted again. She wants to be with
a man who is not only one of her company’s most important clients, but married. As a middle-class white woman, she thinks her American dream is yet again just out of her grasp, but what she considers as “settling” (steady income and a supportive family back in Ohio) would be dream enough for anyone in less fortunate circumstances. How could someone who is lucky enough to be paid to live abroad lament their lot in life?

Though Terwilliger’s plots of backstabbing corporate ladder-climbing and infidelity are a bit predictable, there’s something satisfying about a plot that ties together in a neat bow at the end. Because Halley is power-hungry in her work and her
relationships, she has to decide where she draws the line of how far she is willing to bend her moral compass.
"The Insatiables" falls down the well-worn path of “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” but there’s a reason that readers return to this storyline again and again. Readers don’t want to believe that they will betray their oldest friends to get a leg up in the rat race. Readers want to see that a protagonist will do the morally right thing before the corruption gets too far. Readers want to believe that they will know when they are content with what they have.

The Insatiables centers on Halley, a young and ambitious woman, who is a level 1 Service Staff in her company. She is desperate to climb the corporate ladder and wants to experience more from life than what she has in Dayton, Ohio. She doesn't want to remain stuck like the rest of her family.

An opportunity soon presents itself, and she gets selected to go to France as part of a team that will plan and execute a product launch. She almost gives up the most important things in her life for this job.

France is everything she dreamed it would be and at first, Halley seems content living there. Then things begin to escalate from unacceptable to outrageous. Halley then realizes that the promotion she’s been working so hard for may have just cost her a lot. She has to decide whether or not the job is worth the price of her soul.

The Insatiables is a fun, entertaining debut novel and is perfect for an afternoon curled up on a sofa with a hot chocolate. This book is filled with interesting and quirky characters and an interesting storyline. Halley as the main character was well developed and relatable. The descriptions of France were evocative and the rest of the characters were sympathetic, funny and likeable. There were some characters I couldn't warm up to.

Overall a good read, and I highly recommend. I received this book from NetGalley and Amberjack Publishing in exchange for an honest review.

some good ideas (a shy parallel to the Faust, but too much shy), some consideration on evolutionism at the times of multinational corporations, and a plot that lightens and distracts from the overall ideas. It start with some interesting ideas but the conclusions are somewhat trivial and non-creative. In the times of accelerationism et similia we expected something more, but is nevertheless a good starting point on the Great American Internet Novel https://americanorum.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/stay-foolish-stay/

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a MUST read!

When I started reading the book I thought to myself, how can I get hooked on a book about office life, and then before I knew it I was hooked. I devoured this book and had a hard time putting the book down to go about every day life.

The book was not about an assistant trying to climb the ranks, but rather it was a great expose on this current generation and how we feel we have to do more, have to put more effort in, have to never stop, and we miss everything around us, miss the moments we should cherish, and lack connection to the world and others around us.

I really only put the book down at about 70+% in, and that was because I ached so hard at one part because I felt what the character was feeling, the desire to roll back words that you said or actions that you did, or when words start falling out of your mouth and you are telling yourself to reign it in and you cannot. So would I say that this writing is spectacular and you will lose yourself? Yes!

The characters are insane, the story in insane, it is so opulent and you just feel like a stranger watching it from the outside, hungry for that world but also judging that world and how horrible those people are acting. I do not even know how I came out loving the main character, she makes horrible decisions, she treated people horribly but overall I just loved her.

Halley Faust and her best friend Celeste are stooping to dirty tricks in their competition to get the position in France prepping for Findlay's launch of its newest product, Tantalus. Halley "Faustian Bargain" Faust sacrifices those she loves most in the world to transform herself from a nice Ohio Level 1 into a strong and fearless Level 2 in France who takes charge of her own future. But despite getting the job, a lock-in on career advancement, plus a dreamy new boyfriend, she finds it is none of it enough or worth it. I like the skewering of Millennial entitlement, and Terwilliger's descriptions of the toils and travails of the lowly level 1 Service Staff, and my favorite were the bits about becoming ones parents.