This is a story about the boundaries between work and life in a society shaped by technology.  Recently graduated from college, Ethan Block joined many of his classmates in moving to San Francisco and working at a tech company.  Although he majored in art history, Ethan now is one of three employees of the start-up DateDate, a popular dating app.  He primarily works on content moderation, reviewing uploaded photos flagged as problematic to determine if they should be removed.  Given the app's growing popularity and their small staff, Ethan needs to work nearly constantly to keep up.  Despite the grind, Ethan views his work in tech, and on this app in particular, as noble.

Exacerbating the dominant role that his job plays in his life, Ethan recently broke up with his long-time, live-in girlfriend.  So he decides to override the system on DateDate to view the person the app's algorithm has identified as his soulmate.  When he clicks on the profile of his alleged soulmate, he is somehow transported from his office to a grass field and then right back to the office.  Ethan is convinced this experience is the result of a bug in DateDate's coding, but realizes he will need evidence to convince anyone, including the app's founder.  Ethan soon becomes consumed by this mission.  Along the way, he encounters unlikely and unreliable allies, from a contractor who seems to know more than she lets on, the dominant tech company not just in California but the world, and a collective dedicated to using tech for positive purposes -- and realizes that what he considered a bug in DateDate may be much more.

I really enjoyed this novel — a terrific and original combination of a workplace novel, a coming-of-age story, and a meditation on the societal and personal impacts of technology.  The book’s account of working in tech is perceptive, and often quite funny.  It captures the ways these experiences can be absurd, mundane, and thrilling, and how they differ for those working in startups and big companies.  Ethan is a strong narrator, as we see the ways he often needs to convince himself of the value of his work even as he questions whether he (and his colleagues and friends) would have pursued it if not for the financial rewards.  The disillusionment that we see several characters, all with different roles in and different relationships to tech companies, captures well the broader trajectory of how so many view these companies.  I also really appreciated the role that San Francisco, and the wider Bay Area, plays in the story.  The author does a great job of capturing the nuances of this city and region, including the differences in the neighborhoods and how it has changed, not least of all because of the impact of the tech companies.  

Strongly recommended!

Ethan Block works at one of the hottest new apps, DateDate, which helps people find their best matches based on longform responses to a series of questions. Ethan is, to his mind, an unlikely tech worker. But he soon finds himself consumed by his work, eager to show his value to the app's founder. When he decides to use the app himself and overrides its controls to identify his top match, Ethan has a strange experience -- his match has a picture that appears to be corrupted and when he clicks on it, he feels like he is transported to another, other worldly place.

Eager to recreate the experience, and discover how the app made this possible, he pursues what at first seems like a wild goose chase to find proof. But as he discovers more pictures with similar issues in other profiles and other seeming bugs in the app's code, he is convinced he is on the right track -- and finds himself pulled deeper into his quest and willing to pursue increasingly greater risks to get to the bottom of it, even if it means taking on the dominant tech firm, to do so.

This is a highly engaging coming-of-age story, as the reader sees how the main character navigates his early workplaces and early relationships while trying to figure out what kind of person he is and what he wants out of life. The book also offers interesting depictions of the tech world and Bay Area during this transformative time.

Highly recommended!

I deeply enjoyed the beginning of the book but I began to loose interest when the Founder was fired. There wasn’t much occurring regarding plot development and it was hard to see the direction that the story was going for the rest of the book.

I’m not really sure what to rate this one. I did enjoy parts, but as a whole I didn’t really connect with the book. I thought the portals and multiverses were a fun element, but I just couldn’t relate to the MC, Ethan. I’m sure others will enjoy this!

Having visited San Francisco a few times for work/tech conferences made this book initially catch my eye. Ethan works for a startup tech company called DateDate but when the company/app gets bought out we learn there was more to the story than just finding true love. Technology can be dangerous and some lines just shouldn't be crossed.

I think Riedel does a decent job at bringing the city to life and giving you a good idea of what it's like to work in the tech space. However the plot of this story fell apart and felt disjointed so many times that I struggled to stay interested in the book. On top of that the formatting of this ARC copy made it feel like I was reading the world's longest chapter. I personally think Riedel shows promise in his writing abilities but this one just didn’t land for me.

Please Report your bug here was a great sci-fi look at a possible future. I liked the transportation to other worlds, the sci-fi was a little clunky in its explanation. I appreciate the commentary on our dependence on technology.

Not totally sure what to make of this story. It was super fun and clever in some parts and totally discombobulated in others. I liked the concept. I am all for a simple, non-descript sci-fi story. I don’t need everything explained. The Colorado Hacker was brilliant. I think that maybe I just didn’t care enough about Ethan. Maybe if this had been in third person, so we could catch up with other folks without Ethan from time to time, it might have landed better for me. Still, super fun and I hope Mr. Riedel keeps going.

Please Report Your Bug Here is the debut novel by Josh Riedel. Releasing on January 17, 2023, Henry Holt & Company provided an early galley for review.

From his bio on his website, Riedel has experience working on apps - having been the first employee for Instagram before pursuing Masters degree in fine arts. He also lives in San Francisco where his story takes place. As we always say in the writing group I moderate for our library, drawing upon what you know from real life always helps when crafting your story. I appreciated the various literary and musical references in the book. It gave me insight into the author's tastes and influences.

Coming from a previous software development background, I could relate to Ethan's daily routines, the specifics about how the DateDate app worked and the challenges around supporting it. That resonated with me and also reminded me why I was glad I no longer worked in that field. The choice to not give names to a lot of characters (referring to them instead by their job titles and such) helped emphasize the sometimes faceless nature of corporate work-life.

What really kept me disoriented and at times very confused was the science-fiction elements. Which is a shame as I usually enjoy a good sci-fi tale. Here they were mysterious and even a bit nebulous; that made them hard to keep me interested and focused. I was enjoying the personal elements and their commentary on society, yet the portal mystery ended up distracting and derailing that for me.

All in all, there were a number of parts I really enjoyed as well as how the writer used them to make commentary on today's world with its technology dependency. There is a really good message in this story about that.

Techno-(pseudo)dystopian future blended with some sci-fi elements, this novel has some interesting ideas but leaves something to be desired. Starting with what I appreciated, I will say the overall story is interesting. I like how the sci-fi elements just kind of snuck in halfway through, unexpected, and weren’t really commented on as anything other than the logical extension of technology. I thought there was a good job of really depicting the loneliness, desperation, ego, and aspirations of the main character, the toxic stew that leads so many mediocre white men to stumble-fail their way upwards. The novel doesn’t offer a critique of this as heavily as it could, but as far as character development goes, I felt a reality contained in the protagonist. Lastly, there was an artistic choice to only identify some things by their generic labels (the Founder, the engineer, the Corporation) and yet to pair that with hyper-specificity regarding things like brands or coffee preparation techniques, all the entrapments of wealthy-hipsterism. A generous reading of this is that it presented the all-consuming face of our attention economy, there is no difference or need for proper names as we move from one technological autocracy/behemoth to another, they all consume us equally, and the culture and identity they create is one based on cultivating intense in-group ideologies nurtured and exacerbated by capitalism and specialized knowledge regarding cultural ephemera.

A less generous reading is that it just got tiresome. I think Chemex (a specific coffee preparation technique) is mentioned at least three different times that I can remember off the top of my head, and I would be willing to bet that’s an undercount. It was interesting at first, created a specificity of the tech/start-up scene in San Francisco, but it soon just felt like a crutch, a convenient trick to avoid developing an actual environment or setting beyond the costume it was wearing. Aside from the main character the supporting characters all felt rather two-dimensional, barely tweaked versions of stock characters. Maybe that’s a comment about the interchangeability of individuals who live in this world, but it just felt like a reliance on stereotypical tropes instead of developing personality. The plotting itself was strange, it just felt there was a lot of filler, going places and doing things just for the sake of going there and doing it, not because it mattered in any way. In many ways this felt like a really, really strong short story that turned into an interesting novella and eventually a confused, wandering novel. A lot of these things I can overlook if there is especially beautiful or talented writing, but that isn’t the case here. It isn’t bad, and a lot of the dialogue feels natural and not forced. But there is a utilitarian feel about the writing, a lot more telling than showing, and it doesn’t inspire me or make me want to keep reading it, or re-read it, in the way that good prose can do. Plus, the framing device is pretty much wasted. The novel is framed as if it were written by the main character, a whistle-blower/exposé story aimed directly at us, the audience… but aside from the very opening and the very ending, this form is never really played with. It is just a simple first-person narrative, as countless other novels are. This novel could have chosen to have the narrator address the audience directly before every chapter. Since the narrator is both a student of art history and also deeply entrenched in tech culture, I imagine every chapter, or at least the major sections, could have some sort of reflection somehow showing off these and other uncommon character traits. If the framing device is introduced it should be used both to make the story better and also to make the character more complex, but it just sits there, seemingly forgotten until the last chapter, which was wasted potential.

This novel isn’t bad. But it is somewhat obvious that the author has written a lot of short fiction, and this is his first novel. It has an interesting premise and a complex main character, and while meandering at times the overall pacing, the timing of reveals and developments, all feels pretty good. If tech-dystopia is your jam then there is a good amount of fun to be had here, it just wasn’t enough for me. However, there are enough interesting seeds planted here that I am interested in seeing what else he writes as he continues to develop his long-form story-telling craft.

I want to thank NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company, who provided a complimentary eARC in exchange for an honest review.

An initial employee of a dating app startup details the early days of the company. Things take a weird turn when he happens upon a glitch that transports him to a different place. I enjoyed the setting of a tech start up and the interesting premise, but I felt unconnected to the main character and to be honest, the tech talk and sci fi stuff went completely over my head.

Please Report Your Bug Here is a book about a young man working at a startup (before it gets acquired by a massive corporation). It seems an appropriate book to read when Elon Musk just laid off 50% of Twitter's workforce and demanded 80-hour work weeks for those who survived the bloodbath. I doubt the current backlash against the narrative of the billionaire genius will last for long, but the themes of this book indeed mirrored my current reality. 

For the best parts of Please Report Your Bug Here, explore the wide gap between curated narratives and reality. Things that seem fantastic on paper but are tedious in truth. The difference between the mask we show to the world and what our inner insecurities tell us who we are. Deeming someone as worth listening to based upon the amount of money they have made rather than how they treat the people that contributed to their success. Images that are supposed to be titillating but are incapacitating in abundance.

Or at least the first half of the book explored those themes. Then, when I realized that the main character we had been following (Ethan) might be an unreliable narrator, things got weird. Like metaphysical weird in a way that I wasn't fully prepared for or into.

The plot twist that teleportation was possible through computer code alone had me sighing.  (In retrospect, I probably should have realized that the author was going to play fast and loose with things like biology, chemistry, and physics when the author introduced the mood-detecting paint.)

In addition, I soured on the book's story because it seemed to keep critical information from the reader for no reason. For people supposedly working on the same problem, it was bizarre how little Norma, Henry, and Ethan collaborated or even communicated with each other.

Also, I couldn't tell if I was being overly sensitive, but it bothered me how Ethan related to the women in his life. On the one hand, they got names unlike most of the men Ethan described, who were referred to by their archetypes as " the founder" or "the engineer." On the other hand, every interaction Ethan had with a female was described with a hazy unreality, even interactions that should have been strictly professional, like with his supervisor or the tech journalist.

But really, what moved this book from great to goodish for me was Ethan's ability to mope no matter the external circumstances, as I have a particular loathing of whiney protagonists.

That being said, I loved how the book described Ethan's feelings/ impressions when looking at modern art.  It was the first time I could understand why anyone would choose to look at modern art. 

Please Report Your Bug Here is one of the most unique books I have ever read. Of course, the book's status as a non-humorous satire and the distribution of its metaphysical elements won't appeal to everyone; however, this book is impossible to feel indifferent about.

I find myself very interested in stories about Silicon Valley and tech start ups. It is such a different world than the one I know. My husband and I were mildly obsessed with the HBO series titled, Silicon Valley, so when I read the synopsis of this book, I knew it would be one that would interest me.

The story begins with Ethan, a non-techie who was part of the start up group designing and building the app DateDate, ruminating on his experience. Apparently he has been recording his recollections in an effort to write a manuscript of his DateDate journey. He then walks the reader through his memories, starting with his entry into the tech start-up world even though his background is in the arts. In the beginning, he is proud to be affecting history and putting DateDate's mark on the world. His memories are indicative of his feelings of inferiority and good fortune. The fact that he calls his partners, The Founder and The Engineer are indicative of the sort of relationship they possessed. The story goes on to detail the rise of the app, eventual purchase by The Company and then Ethan uncovering secrets that the Founder was hiding. It leads him to a journey he never imagined. His feelings morph as he gets pulled further and further in.

"I stared at my shoes and wondered if she could tell from my wardrobe that I was split over who to be."

This story was a mash up of several genres - Literary Fiction, Science Fiction and Dystopian. It felt like the overarching message was how easily these companies and apps can become intrusive while being largely unregulated. I have to admit that the technology was a little more than I could fully comprehend, but I still really enjoyed this story. None of the characters stood out as particularly likeable - but I think the story was more about the technology and its possible effects. This story held my attention throughout and I found it interesting and original. Definitely recommend. Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt for the advance copy to read and review.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for providing me an advanced copy of this to read and review.

I'm a huge fan tech dystopia, especially when it's set in the not-so-distant future. What I was hoping for (and I feel like the blurb promised) was a story about how a dating app that uses questionable, intrusive technology to find you the perfect match causes an incident and the fallout of said incident. What I got instead was a bait and switch that starts off with a dating app but then turns into an absolutely ridiculous story about portals to other worlds and tech explanations that you "could never possibly understand" because it's nonsense.

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of positive things to say about this book. I finished it. I almost didn't but I wanted to see how they solved the big problem. Spoiler, they don't, and it's written away in some philosophical "maybe it's for the best" monologue that I didn't buy at all. It felt like the author wrote himself into a hole and couldn't dig himself out. Nothing about the tech made sense, which instantly made me disinterested. The things I love about tech dystopia books, and that make them scary to me, is that it's usually based around tech that's possible now with upgrades that are either currently being discussed or that don't seem too far off. There's also a sense of mystery about the tech. It's explained, but there's usually a sense of "we don't know how it works actually." This book uses so much jargon and tech/science terms to try to explain how every single part of the technology works, that it just makes no sense and I immediately don't care. The book tries to sound smart, but it actually just alienates its audience.

In addition, none of the characters show any growth or have any personalities beyond "young tech worker who is still discovering themself." Ethan was as interesting as my coffee table, and I really like my coffee table. The Founder was a walking caricature of a tech entrepreneur. The Engineer disappeared pretty quickly, Noma had not personality beyond how Ethan saw her. Allie and Tanni were non-existent beyond plot dev for Ethan. Ethan was not interesting enough to carry this book.

Lastly, the plot was all over the place. I'm still not clear on what happened and what story this book was trying to tell. It's on the shorter side, but the last half drags on and took me about 2 weeks to read. I don't think I'll be giving this author another try.

The premise of this book really caught my eye, but the plot moves so slowly that it was difficult to be engaged as I read it. Still, the ideas in this story are interesting and unique, and I would check out other books by this author in the future.

This book was slightly difficult for me to rate as 1.) I wound up DNFing it around 70% and 2.) I don’t have particularly strong feelings about it. Even if a book is really not for me and I strongly dislike it, this can still evoke a certain passion. However, Please Report Your Bug Here just had me feeling sort of “meh”. I had very little drive to keep reading in order to find out what happened or what became of the characters.

There were a lot of small aspects of this story that I did enjoy— including the mystery behind the black box images, the technology used to create the Portals app, and Noma’s character. However, I think I went into this book expecting a sci-fi plot with more action based on the description. This novel is definitely much more of an understated slow-burn. Unfortunately, because of how far into the story certain conflicts were introduced, I wasn’t very vested in the resolutions.

I also kept going back and forth about whether the attributes of the protagonist, Ethan, were written with intention or not. He seemed just out of touch enough to be awkward, but I think in order to make a statement, it should have been handled with more conviction.

Although this one didn’t wow me, it may be a book that I find myself thinking back on somewhat often. I also think I would possibly recommend it to someone else if I thought they were the right audience.

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt & Co. for an eARC of this book in exchange for feedback.

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company for an eARC of Please Report Your Bug Here in exchange for an honest review.

After reading the summary of this book, I was really excited to see how the story unfolded. Sadly, this book didn’t compare to its summary. I felt the story took too long to develop into the main plot and that the explanations in the beginning could have been incorporated throughout the book to move the story along faster.

The storyline itself also felt very underdeveloped. I finished the book with a lot of questions; some about the plot but also about the logistics of the technology that was created in the book. The story also jumped around a lot so I never felt I had sufficient closure on some plot elements until they were revisited in a later chapter. I also didn’t care for any of the characters which made the book a drag to read.

I would recommend this book to people who like stories about teleportation, and are interested in the technology industry. I would let them know, however, that the story itself isn’t that compelling and that there is no gratifying ending.

I rate this book 2/5 stars because the technology created and used in the book was interesting, but the story itself was all over the place and a struggle to get through.

I couldn’t finish this book… I made it maybe 20%. I couldn’t identify with any of the characters, found the plot to be lacking interest, and man the pace of this story is reallllyyy slow.

Note: I received an Advanced Reader Copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
To be honest, reading this book was like wading through sludge— it took way too long to make a point. There are many times where it seems like the main character is about to make a big realization that will help him grow as a character, but then fails to rise to the occasion. Perhaps others will see this as realistic, but the repetition made me grow tired.
I had no idea who the author was when I volunteered for this ARC, but at 50% I decided to Google him as I was getting irritated. Reading his author blurb made the book make sense— it comes off as what the first employee of Instagram wishes his contributions to the world were.
This is far from the worst book I’ve read, but I won’t be reaching for it again. I believe readers who enjoy modern, realistic science fiction with an unreliable narrator will enjoy this book.

Hmmm, I'm struggling with this rating! I would say I enjoyed this book, but not for the reasons one might expect, and I found the first half to be much more compelling than the second.

What worked well for me:
- The descriptions of the tech scene were uncomfortably, uncannily lucid - though I didn't know this when I read it, I'm not at all surprised that the author was the first employee at Instagram!
- The vivid sense of place; San Francisco (and Oakland, and the South Bay, and, hell, even the shuttle!) truly were supporting characters.
- The dynamics between Ethan, our somewhat hapless protagonist, and the much stronger and more opinionated characters around him, like Mona and "the Founder".
- Ethan's obvious discomfort and struggle to find his footing throughout his time at DateDate and in his early days at "The Corporation"; I thought his thoughtful, tentative interiority - especially contrasted against the brash confidence of his environments - was extremely well-done.

What didn't work so well:
- Just one, but it's a big one: I didn't find the central conflict - will Ethan be able to get back to the "mystery world" and achieve [spoiler]? - particularly clear or compelling. I understand it's sci-fi, but I read a lot of sci-fi, and the logic behind the glitch fell flat for me. I think I would have been willing to overlook this if the events the glitch set in motion were more interesting, but they almost felt like a distraction - I cared more about Ethan's deteriorating relationship with Noma, and his general identity issues, than this plotline. (And I understand that they're related, but ... that felt a little forced.) Overall, the second half of the book - in which this plotline takes precedence - just didn't feel real or exciting to me, even though in theory it should have.

Thanks to Henry Holt & Co and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Having grown up in San Francisco made this book incredibly enjoyable, with the development of the environment. Ethan works for a start up tech company called DateDate. DateDate is (you guessed it,) a dating app. When the app gets bought, Ethan learns that there was more to DateDate than just finding true love and that technology and pushing the boundaries of technology can be dangerous.

I really enjoyed that this book was set in San Francisco. Ridel does a great job at bringing the city to life, having Ethan visit the iconic Golden Gate Park but also more obscure places (like Louis', which unfortunately doesn't exist anymore! *shakes fist at the National Park Service*) Brought me back to my old romping grounds.