I really wasn't sure what to expect from this and tbh i almost didn't finish but I ended up invested and had to know how things worked out for eliza.
the hatred from the male gamer population to her and the obsession they created was at times scary. for people to track your location and cyber stalk for no real reason is very scary. the reveal of the inspector was also chilling because it hints at how the new generation is so absorbed in tech and not the outside world. the chapters with the multiple possibilities were cool though at times threw me off but i did really enjoy the chat chapters those were cool.

DNF - Did not finish. I did not connect with the writing style or plot and will not be finishing this title. Thank you, NetGalley and Publisher for the early copy!

This book was absolutely fantastic and astonishing!! I really enjoyed this and it was absolutely beautiful!

Eliza Bright's whole life is turned upside down after she dares to speak out against workplace sexual harassment. She is employed at Fancy Dog Games, developer of Guilds of the Protectorate, a multiplayer online role-playing game similar to World of Warcraft. The game's virtual reality consists of superheroes and villains in Windy City, a fictionalized combination of New York City and Chicago inspired by those cities' actual landscapes. The game was created by company founders Preston Waters and his college roommate. Employees all play the game using their virtual identities which are known to each other. Preston sits in a glass-walled office in the middle of the office with his dog (named "Dog"), and employees are encouraged to bring their own dogs to work, as well.

Eliza was hired to work in quality assurance, but after a year and a half spent teaching herself coding, she was promoted just three days ago. Preston made it clear that if she wants to advance at Fancy Dog Games, she will have "to eat, sleep, breathe and live Guilds of the Protectorate." Eliza is committed.

Now she is a member of a three-person coding team and arrives at work on Monday morning after working all weekend to find that her work on the game's new feature (dubbed the "sex patch") was changed using Github after she completed the assignment. Now the section of code she drafted is replete with "//80085," but she quickly notifies her colleagues and uploads a clean copy so they won't have to waste time fixing any sort of bug. Her male teammates are Jean-Pascale Desfrappes and Lewis Fleishman, known as JP and Lewis or, within the game, Black Hole and Dr. Moriarity. And they are not at all happy about the prospect of working with Eliza. Or any woman, for that matter. When Eliza asks her friends, Devonte Alba, a gameplay developer working in high-level quality assurance, and Suzanne Choy, who is in charge of customer service, about the strange code, they immediately recognize that Eliza is being set up. It means “boobs” and her male teammates have inserted it throughout her code.

The narration is astute, clever, and chilling, comprised of the "collective, hive-mind brain" that is the internet. “We’re always here, on the internet, eyes trained on our cast. On Twitter, Reddit, even in Windy City, we can find out a lot. And what we don’t know, we can guess; or we can ask; or we can invent.” They are voyeurs with an agenda, "obsessed with what goes on where we can’t see it.” Through them, readers watch events unfold as observers exposed to both the action and the narrators' (“the Reddit manosphere") opinions. For instance, observing Eliza's distress at discovering the true meaning of the code and her consternation over whether to report her teammates' behavior, the collective narrator notes, "It's not a big deal! She's making a mountain out of a molehill, and at the first sign of actual gaming culture, she's running away and crying. If she can't do the job, she doesn't belong here. But whatever, cry alone. Go for it." The narration moves from actual events to developments taking place within the game, and includes text messages between the characters, all of which move the story forward at an unrelenting pace.

Osworth says the story was "heavily, heavily influenced by and loosely based on" Gamergate, an event Osworth refers to as a "raging wildfire of misogyny," homophobia, and transphobia. In August 2014, independent game developer Zoe Quinn and gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian were harassed online. Quinn's ex publicly and falsely accused her of sleeping with a journalist in order to get favorable reviews. The systemic, consistent abuse of Quinn and other women in and associated with the gaming industry led to an FBI investigation, and spawned debate about sexual harassment, feminism, and journalistic integrity. Threats against some of the targets were so specific that they were forced into hiding and, in some cases, career changes. At the time, Osworth was covering "nerd culture" and they did not actually realize they were writing about it "until it started coming out of me." They were so angry about the situation, in part, because it impacted the culture of online gaming. So essentially, writing We Are Watching Eliza Bright amounted to raging against Gamergate.

Eliza does, in fact, report that she has been subjected to sexism in the workplace and the story is an analysis of the horrifying fall-out from her decision. We Are Watching Eliza Bright is a profoundly searing examination of both a toxic workplace culture, and the impact of the internet and that collective voice in the wake of Eliza's decision to speak up and stand up for herself. In crafting the story, Osworth says they "knew from the jump that Eliza wasn't going to quit" and she doesn't. She is a strong, determined woman who knows that the behavior to which she is subjected is wrong and she does not have to settle for being treated with anything but professionalism and respect in her workplace.

We are Watching Eliza Bright is engrossing and creative. When Eliza finds herself in danger, she takes refuge with the Sixsterhood, a queer artist collective residing in a warehouse that serves as a contrasting collective voice. Those choruses, like the voices of each of the individual characters, are credible and relatable. Osworth cleverly ensnares readers into being part of the choruses, forcing them to question whether they are in agreement with the messages or sufficiently outraged by the misogyny that they, like Eliza, would stand strong against it even at great personal peril. In fact, Osworth relates that the experience of writing the story gave them the tools to examine what happens when they "think a thought that I don't endorse. I get to think about how to address that. When I think a thought about me that sounds like my narrators should say it, I know that's not coming from me. That's coming from the misogynistic voices that we're all getting all the time. How can I figure out how to diffuse that?"

We Are Watching Eliza Bright is a suspenseful thriller in which Eliza is stalked by a crazed gamer who uses the internet in an effort to achieve retribution. Thus, the story is simultaneously contemporary and timeless. The setting and backdrop Osworth utilizes to tell the deeply disturbing story are decidedly timely, but Eliza's fear, frustration, and anger could be compellingly portrayed in many different time periods. Osworth believes that many authors are currently tackling internet issues because "so much of our lives are lived on the internet now that we have phones in our pockets" and we are constantly connected, but finds it interesting that "we are turning to a much older art form to make sense of" our relationship with technology and the interactions that take place online. Like many of us, Osworth confesses to having a love-hate relationship with the internet, which is evident in the story. Osworth's passion for the subject matter and their characters is equally apparent on every page, as is their empathy for Eliza and her plight. Indeed, they proved "I am a person who can, in fact, write 419 pages out of spite." And in this case, spite spawned a dark, but highly entertaining and thought-provoking story.

We Are Watching Eliza Bright is a riveting, first-rate debut novel with a powerful message about empowerment, persistence, and feminism, as well as a considered exploration of the tenuous boundary between real life and online existence, from a talented new voice in fiction.

This uniquely narrated thriller is focused on a young woman living her dream as a video game coder, until she is fired for complaining about relentless harassment by her male coworkers. She’s got solidarity from the Sixsterhood, a queer underground collective, and she’ll need all the help she can get when things get violent.

We Are Watching Eliza Bright is a great story that forces us to look at what technology is really doing to us, how much it allows us to hide, and the negative ways that anonymity is used. Following #gamergate and #cancelculture, we step into an interesting narrative structure that allows us to watch Eliza, as she struggles with the backlash of finally speaking up. The only difficulty I had with this book was the heavy tech themes throughout; which occasionally went over my head.

4/5 Stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for providing me with an e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Whether I buy a book or it was sent by the publisher, I pride myself on being honest in my reviews so here's the truth - after the first few chapters of 𝗪𝗘 𝗔𝗥𝗘 𝗪𝗔𝗧𝗖𝗛𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗘𝗟𝗜𝗭𝗔 𝗕𝗥𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧, I was tempted to DNF. The POV is kind of an omniscient first-person plural "we" and it was hard to adjust to but the subject was so compelling that I couldn't put it down. I'm so glad I didn't give up. The narration not only grew on me but added to the tension and unease this book requires of a reader.

The "we" character, for lack of a better word, is unreliable at best and pathological at worst as they share the story of Eliza Bright. We meet her after her promotion to developer at Fancy Dog Games where, her first week on the job, two men she works with insert 80085 into her code (think about it). When Eliza stands up for herself, she gets doxxed online, receives death threats on social media and becomes a target for one obsessed user who goes by "The Inspectre."

The plot is reminiscent of 2014's Gamergate and the attacks on women, people of color, queer, nonbinary and trans people by online trolls, and while at times it gets heavy and unrelenting (as the attacks themselves must feel to those receiving them), there are moments of levity too. Don't be scared off by the video-game speak or the tech lingo because the themes are universal. A.E. Osworth's debut is a unique and thought-provoking depiction of how fragile straight white men can be and how much damage online harassment can do.

4.5 stars

Thanks to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for the gifted copy.

The narration style is very unique and takes awhile to get used to. We Are Watching is unlike any thriller I've read--more relevant. I'm not sure how I feel about it overall, but I applaud the creativity and effective satire.

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 13, 2021

It’s early, but We Are Watching Eliza Bright might be the most inventive novel I will read this year. From its prose (“Suzanne twitches and wonders how a room without a door can smell so Strongly of anything let alone the ephemeral subtle stench of depression”) to its structure to its surprising plot, A.E. Osworth has crafted a timely American original.

The novel’s point of view might be its best feature. For the most part, the POV is collective. As the title implies, the novel is narrated by the “we” who are watching Eliza Bright. The narrators “watch” Eliza with their eyes when she is in their line of sight, by hacking her computer or phone, by tracking her online presence, by monitoring the location of devices belonging to people who have contact with her, and through crowdsourced surveillance. Some of the watchers are Eliza’s co-workers, including Leaky Joe, who feeds information to the collective that he gleans by watching Eliza from a distance with his “mad lipreading skills.” Others are members of the gaming community.

Members of the collective often draw different conclusions about the facts they are narrating, usually because they are speculating about events that occur outside of their physical or virtual presence. Sometimes the collective narrates alternative versions of things that they imagine might have happened. In one version of a visit to Eliza’s apartment by her boss, they have sex; in another, the boss doesn’t even take his coat off. Either version makes for a good story.

The “we” who read about Eliza on Reddit have a perspective that they believe to be more civilized than that of the “we” who read about her on 4chan. While the collective shares diverse opinions, we know that it is unified in its disdain for Eliza. Most of its members view her friend and co-worker Suzanne as a “social justice warrior,” the idea of social justice being particularly abhorrent to those who benefit from its absence.

The collective is dominated by males; few women remain “who have not been driven away.” The males in the collective generally view themselves as victimized by females. They believe “the world isn’t safe for normal white men anymore.” They presumably hang out on Reddit for affirmation. Suzanne belongs to a female collective counterpart, allies of Eliza who call themselves “the Sixsterhood.” They interact in person and presumably stay far away from Reddit.

The story initially centers on a relatively mild instance of sexual harassment that quickly escalates when Eliza complains about it. Eliza works for Fancy Dog Games. Her boss is Preston Waters. Preston co-created a popular game called Guilds of the Protectorate. Eliza is a gamer whose avatar is called Circuit Breaker. Eliza is not a coder but she gets promoted to a position that requires her to develop coding skills. Other (mostly male) coders resent her presence and mark her lines of code with 80085, which looks like the word boobs if you squint just right. Eliza complains to Preston, which makes the coders, led by Lewis Fleishman and Jean-Pascale Desfrappes, go ballistic. How dare she? Doesn’t she have a sense of humor? Preston, who portrays himself as woke and open and is very into deep and meaningful Conversations with employees, pretends to be concerned while he — with the utmost display of sensitivity — encourages Eliza to drop the whole thing so everyone can return their focus to helping Fancy Dog make money. Meanwhile, the coders who watch through the office windows assume that Eliza is shagging Preston because why else wouldn’t he have fired her for complaining about them?

Eliza wants Fancy Dog to change the male-centric culture that characterizes the tech industry and gaming. When she doesn’t back down as a good “team player” should — when she in fact shares her concerns with the media — the coders decide to punish her. Soon the entire word of gaming joins in the fun, which isn’t fun for Eliza. In fact, they want to instill fear in Eliza, from which they derive the equivalent of sexual pleasure that they probably can’t get in any other way. The worst of them, a sadist who calls himself The Inspectre, sets out to terrorize her. The Inspectre is much admired in the collective for having the courage to do things in the real world that others only fantasize about. More timid members of the collective content themselves with raping Circuit Breaker inside Guilds.

The novel’s form is occasionally experimental, but not drastically so. Periods are sometimes omitted from sentences. (I imagine that’s a statement about a generation that grew up writing periodless texts.) Important words are capitalized; words in phrases are capitalized as if they are titles. Many chapters consist of text message chains.

The novel explores physical and psychological threats to women in the workplace, the use of NDAs to silence wronged employees, and the team-building style of business management that pretends to be more humanistic than traditional heirarchical companies. On a more philosophical level, We Are Watching Eliza Bright asks whether there is any longer a difference between the virtual world and the physical world. Eliza argues that online encounters, in gaming environments or other virtual settings, are just as important as encounters in meatspace. We convince ourselves that “things that happen in games and online aren’t important” when they might be just as psychologically consequential as in-person interactions. Eliza contends that it is dangerous to “fragment our society even further” by living in a virtual world without human interaction, a world that breeds incels and white nationalists in the absence of the civilizing influence of community.

It could be argued that online communities are not much different from physical communities and that people who think alike will seek each other out, in physical space or in online communities. That certainly seems to be true of white nationalists. Perhaps online life is different for nerdish guys (and I say this as someone who was once a nerdish kid), who might develop a resentment of women who dismiss them as undesirable. Perhaps their resentments are reinforced in online communications that encourage hostility to women in the workplace. Whether or not the reader is persuaded by Eliza’s argument, the story makes clear that the discussion is worth having. In any event, the story is worth reading for its literary and entertainment value apart from the book club discussions it might inspire.

RECOMMENDED

I really tried to get into this one, and while the premise was really intriguing, there was something off about the execution of the story. It was so dry and technical, I just wasn't able to get into it. I wasn't able to connect with the story or the characters, and nothing about it was holding my interest.

I ended up giving up on it because I was starting to get annoyed that I wasn't enjoying it.

"'But like--games. They're never just games. Just like they're never just memes or just a joke. It's all the culture, you know? Like all this, it's the fabric of our lives. It's all a reflection of everything we do, everything we believe. It's how we communicate what we value to other people. It's the way we socialize, the things we talk about. You know it's not just games.'"

We Are Watching Eliza Bright explores a tech industry scandal that begins when Eliza Bright is promoted to a small coding team at Fancy Dog Games. Her new colleagues are unimpressed, not only by her lack of formal credentials, but also the fact she is a woman. Eliza isn’t sure how to respond to their first incident of sabotage, it’s a juvenile effort easily rectified, but eventually decides to complain, only to be indulged with a performative response. Eliza’s annoyed, but one of her colleagues in particular is reassured by the lack of consequences, and after Eliza speaks to a journalist about his venomous rant, she is fired, doxxed, and suddenly the target of a maelstrom of misogyny online, and in real life.

“He is emboldened now that he understands what we have always understood: there is protection in the brotherhood of gaming...”

We Are Watching Eliza Bright is clearly inspired by #gamergate, as well as the #metoo movement, exploring the experience of sexism and harassment in a male dominated workspace that escalates into an online furore that then has terrifying real life consequences. It is both a frightening exposé of cultural misogyny and the increasing overlap between online and the real world, and a celebration of resilience, friendship and community.

“It almost doesn’t matter what she says; it almost doesn’t matter what we think of her. What we want is to put our eyes on her, to possess her, to be involved. We want to know everything.”

I have to admit the narrative perspective threw me and I never grew comfortable with it, even though I think is was a clever technique on the part of the author, emphasising the anonymous, voyeuristic way we consume similar real life scandals, while providing opposing viewpoints and insight. Much of the story unfolds from the perspective of the men in the novel, from the anonymous gamer mob who offer opinion, rumour and lies, fuelling outrage, to the seething toxicity of Lewis and the anonymous Inspectre, to the ‘good guys’ like Preston and Devonte, who don’t understand why their silence isn’t enough of an expression of their solidarity. Occasionally their voices are interrupted by a group known as the Sixsterhood, who protest the mob narrative and endeavour to defend Eliza. Transcripts of IM’s and texts highlight individual thought and opinion.

“They’ll see he’s not a monster; his only crime is being smarter than everyone, needing the challenge. And as long as she confesses her sins, says she won’t try to ruin the world for his brothers again,.... He thinks perhaps he’ll confront her—give her the opportunity to compliment his prowess. He imagines she’ll admit her own inferiority.”

The suspense lies largely in the escalating behaviour of an anonymous gamer determined to make sure Eliza, and all women, understand she is wrong - for speaking out, for invading his culture, for laughing at him. He has no doubt about the righteousness of his ‘mission’, and the outcome of such conviction is inevitable, but no less shocking for it.

“This—this is a feeling deeper than love. It is an obsession. A second life.”

With its unusual structure and provocative content, We Are Watching Eliza Bright isn’t an easy read, but it is a penetrating, thought-provoking and powerful exploration of modern culture.

Thanks to Grand Central Publishing + Netgalley for the e-ARC of "We Are Watching Eliza Bright" by AE Osworth.

This is a book that is certainly going to stick with me. I had read A. E. Osworth's article on Mashable a while back (Trolls thought I was a man. That saved me.). I knew I would want to read their book when it was published.

"We are Watching Eliza Bright" centers around Eliza Bright, a video game developer who calls out harassment in her workplace. Truly, this is an emotionally difficult book, full of unreliable narrators, horrid abuse and harassment, and all sorts of uncertainty.

We Are Watching Eliza Bright is a trippy novel that promises to "explore the dark recesses of the Internet and male rage, and the fragile line between the online world and real life"

Reading this novel I found myself wondering what was happening. Which I suppose is the point of a mystery. Right off the bat we're introduced into opposing narratives that do they're best to let us know what's happening. It was unlike anything I've read before.

It focuses on what it's like for Eliza as a female in a male dominated industry. It shows how women in the workplace don't always have somewhere to express when they feel uncomfortable or like they're being sexually harassed. This was very techy and full of references to the gaming world. I enjoyed the plot as well as the characters.

This was a thought-provoking read

CW: sexual harassments, online harassment, stalking, doxxing

I love that this book was about a woman in a STEM field. That alone makes this book stand out besides the writing, which was wonderful, and the character development, which I thought was great.

Eliza Bright is a female coder at Fancy Dog Games, the company behind the massive multiplayer online role-playing game, Guilds of the Protectorate. She reports sexism at the company. Ultimately, the story goes public, and she is doxed.

This story is told from the perspective of the "we" who are watching. It's fascinating to get in to that head space. The voice is an uncertain one, raising possible versions of what happened, and many of those versions are sexist and racist. And so, we really are implicated. This book requires you to ask yourself what you believe and who you believe.

As someone who has followed the misogyny in online video game development, I found this book fascinating. But it also felt horrifying and real.

I read the book in a single evening because I needed to know what happened next. While I felt the middle dragged a bit, I was incredibly impressed by the unique voice and storytelling. This is such an important topic to see covered.

TW: sexual harassment, rape threats, suicide

Thank you to Grand Central and NetGalley for this ARC.

A gift from Netgalley. This title should come with a trigger warning that only gamers will understand most of it. In the first part the narrator promised a maelstrom, which in my opinion never happened and broke the cardinal rule of show not tell. Then there was some omnipotent viewpoint, which is something beginning writers shouldn’t tackle. Then we go onto “choose your own adventure” except you had to read completely through all the choices. Gamers may like this book, but I’m not a gamer and it was a bad choice for me.

Very fast paced novel that is a fictionalization of gamergate. Lots of subplots and got a bit confusing in the middle. Happy ending with some vigilante revenge.

Eliza is excited to code as a new employee at a popular gaming company. When she experiences sexual harassment and complains, her personal file is released to the public and the harassment is immense.

I was really into the story in the beginning. Around 50-60% in, it got more abstract and a little weird for me. Some of it got too techy. I think that true gamers and fans of the internet social world will enjoy this. There were a lot of conversations through text. Sites like Reddit and Tumblr take a major role in the story. For me it just warped a little too heavy on that side. I loved the main story. It was difficult reading what Eliza was going through but I know this was based on experiences that truly happen in the industry.

“We live in a time where almost everyone has at least two bodies, and the second life is far more thrilling than the first.”

We Are Watching You Eliza Bright comes out 4/13.

Attributes: adult fiction, novel, dark comedy/thriller

Tags: unreliable narrators fight for chapters, gamergate, toxic fandom, IT'S ABOUT ETHICS IN GAME JOURNALISM!!!!!

Quick note: I received a free copy of this book from Grand Central Publishing via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. That did not influence the content of this review.

We Are Watching Eliza Bright is about video games. And memes. And jokes. And it's also about none of those things. It paints a picture of how all those things feed into culture, and narrative, and belief, and values.

“It's not just games” echoes through the core of a book as it tells a tale where sexual harassment escalates to physical assault, and where game culture escalates to gamified gendered violence. At points, the book gets uncomfortably close to recent events, clearly drawing inspiration from actual episodes of harassment during Gamergate.

Personally, I loved every second. It's a emotionally difficult: Horrible things happen to the titular Eliza Bright. Eliza starts her first week of her dream job as a developer on one of her favorite video games, a superhero MMORPG. Her new coworkers mess up her code and write “boobs” all over it. Her company mishandles Bright's harassment report, so she goes to a journalist. The responses, of course, vary: She's taking things too seriously, it's just a joke, she's a feminist hero, would she like a new job with us, etc. Then one of the coworkers doxxes her. Eliza's blip in the news cycle turns into a barrage of harassment and stalking (much of which comes from actual things that have happened to actual doxxed women). Things get much, much worse from there.

In some ways, the plot takes a backseat to its telling. The thing is, we don't really know what happened with Eliza Bright. Dueling narrators fight over the chapters. On the one hand, we have toxic fandom, the obsessive players of the MMORPG that Eliza helps develop. On the other (slight spoilers), a group of queers who live in a commune that helps Eliza hide later in the book.

This book is a telephone game, and a conspiracy theory. Most chapters follow the twisted fantasies of the internet stalkers who imagine entire scenes based on a latitude-longitude code placing two people in the same room. They put pieces together from digital leftovers. As their information decreases in quality, they'll recast three versions of the exact same scenes, taking cues from hackers and public records and data dumps.

But they've never met Eliza, or her boss or her coworkers. And as they tell the tale, it becomes increasingly clear that the fans are living in a crass drama of their own making.

(It's basically reading a book narrated by this guy:

Image of Charlie Day as Charlie Kelley in popular Pepe Silvia meme pointing at a serial killer conspiracy board

Meanwhile, the author is carefully constructing a story that shows all the ways said guy's talking points become literally dangerous – and relentlessly making fun of him.)

It sounds disorienting. In the hands of a lesser author, this could have gone horribly wrong. But this was one of my favorite parts of the book. Osworth handles it phenomenally – they balance readability, unreliability, and maybe-clues-about-reality. It's always extremely clear when the narrators are backtracking, and their biases are right on the page.

(Worth a mention here that Osworth has tackled similarly complex topics in their essays, often while messing with form, and I've loved those as well. See some standouts on bisexuality and thirst traps and gender in VR.)

If you're a reader who wants to definitively, actually know “what happened,” you might have some trouble with this book. The queer commune narrators do shed some actual, probably-more-accurate light on the proceedings later on. But a huge portion of the story is still filtered through others who are, you know, watching Eliza Bright, and not very kind about it. At the end of the story, you very likely know what happened – especially about certain key events that most definitely did occur – but you also have no idea about some tidbits behind the scenes. But, again, what actually, definitely happened every step of the way is, in some senses, beside the point.

A lot of fiction that takes this type of approach uses the ambiguity of the events, and the unreliability of the narrator, to avoid committing to a point of view. “We're just asking questions!” is the general energy. But Osworth does the opposite. Every bit of ambiguity in Eliza Bright's story builds to a larger point and structure. The book is full to the brim with a point of view, and that is not ambiguous.

Instead of distracting, these narrative lenses end up making a host of powerful points about paths of disinformation, how “harmless jokes” connect to more literal harms... and they also make a compelling argument that it matters who gets to tell a story. (A lot of recent books have had the thesis “stories matter.” Very few have really articulated why as clearly as this one.) The gamerbros straight-up on-the-page get mad that queer people get to take over the narrative, and it's fantastic. You can practically hear the same talking heads screaming “it's about ethics in game journalism!!!!!!!!!!” on Twitter.

This book has a sense of humor about most of its contents – but it's still deeply humane, sympathetic to its characters who do no harm and unflinching from the realities of its nastier occupants. This one's heftier at 420 pages, and a bit denser of a read if you want to pick out all the details. But it's well worth the mental energy.

We Are Watching Eliza Bright is somehow systematic and slippery at once. It follows the titular character through a hard-fought promotion as a developer at primarily male-staffed Fancy Dog Games, where she is instantly met with demeaning misogynistic attacks from her coworkers and faced with the struggle of whether to speak up. Will anything change? Will it be worse after? Does she owe it to all the uncelebrated, hardworking women in games to call it out? Unfortunately for Eliza, she chose to find out.

Told from two opposing perspectives, Osworth cloaks the reader in anonymity so we too are watching Eliza Bright. We are not quite her, but not quite them either. We're first submerged in an obsessive, incel troll echo chamber that felt realistic enough to make reading difficult early in the text. We're subject to their pervasive assumptions and outright lies spreading like wildfire to fit their narrative and keep their world under (their) control. We get the small breath of relief of temporary shelter within a queer art commune, doting on Eliza with unquestioning love and community support. We eavesdrop on perspectives from both the antagonist(s) and protagonist(s). We are allowed to choose (though, if you truly see a choice, you've perhaps missed the message here).

Osworth's writing was thoughtful and detailed. I was not surprised to read that they worked on this text for half a decade. The care showed. There was a surprising mix of tender and analytical. Humor and disgust. Cyberspace and meatspace. Ambiguity and clarity. Several of the secondary characters received enough detail and story arcs that they felt fulfilled instead of an untied thread. Most importantly, the story moved along and maintained its suspense while providing enough detail to created a virtual reality not completely unlike that which got Eliza into this situation in the first place. All in all, a very fun and thought-provoking read from a promising voice.