I cannot wait for the sad hot girls on booktok to wet themselves over this book. Honestly it’s so good I would join them except now I need to lay in bed and have an existential crisis for a few weeks. Everything of my Ottessa Moshfegh-Ling Ma dreams.

ARC provided by NetGalley.

I am a 30-something woman much like the main character in this book. I, however, have never got off the school train, and am still in academia. The world of cooperate seems to me like you fit in to one of two positions. You are working 24-7 and things would collapse without you, or your there to fill time and if you disappeared from the face of the earth your boss wouldn't blink an eye. Sarah Etter's book managed to blend these two sides into a terrifying look at the world of start up tech. A place I am glad I have thus far avoided.
Furthermore it gives a complex take on the relationships we have and mental health. Sarah Etter's ability to use magical realistic elements in a way that doesn't feel flippant, over-done, or too obscure in both her novels makes look forward to whatever she produces in the future.

4⭐️my favorite genre, mentally ill women!!!! It follows a woman working in tech and hating every single moment of it. A social commentary on hustle culture and late stage capitalism, this was excellent and so harsh. The ending was really painful. Ripe comes out in July, thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

After reading Etter's Book of X a couple months ago, I was thrilled at the opportunity to read Ripe. It did not disappoint!

This was such an engrossing and beautiful read. I think many women living under modern-day capitalism will feel connected to Cassie, the main character. Her despair as she navigates work, relationships, and loneliness is fundamentally real in a way that is both heartbreaking and relatable.

Ripe is filled with vivid imagery. It is less overtly surreal than Book of X but still includes a central element of magical realism, which adds poignancy and depth to Cassie's experience of life. One thing I really appreciate about Etter's work is that the imagery and use of surrealism/magical realism is always incredibly meaningful. It can be shocking and strange, but it's never just for shock value. In Ripe, surreal imagery and magical realism elements are used to viscerally expose Cassie's inner emotional landscape, without requiring her to narrate each thought. This allows the reader to experience her feelings directly, as she does, rather than read about them.

This book packs a powerful punch, especially given its short length. I found myself tearing up at parts, I felt so connected to Cassie, and I devoured it in just three sittings.

Emotionally resonant, uncanny, and sharp-- Ripe is a poetic yet searing portrait of womanhood and the exhaustion of capitalism. There really isn't anything I can compare it to, but I think fans of Carmen Maria Machado, Sophie Mackintosh, Sarah Moss, and Halle Butler would all enjoy Ripe. I already have a few people in mind I plan to buy a copy for!

Thanks to Scribner & NetGalley for the arc, which I received in exchange for an honest review. I will post this review on Goodreads closer to the publication date.

Thanks to netgalley for the advance copy of Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter. This is a satisfying read and great commentary. It'll haunt you with a sense of dread the size of a black hole/

In pre-pandemic Silicon Valley, Cassie works for VOYAGER, a tech company that specializes in targeted advertising. She is surrounded by Believers, tech workers who have fully bought into the mindset and lifestyle you need to succeed in the high-pressure, competitive industry they work in. Cassie is not a Believer, instead she puts her true self away at work and pretends to be one of them. But as news of a mystery virus and wildfires grows and she's asked to push the boundaries at work, her life becomes increasingly out of control. Set against a backdrop of extreme privilege and wealth contrasted with extreme poverty and displacement, RIPE is a devastating social commentary on women's lives, capitalism, and the state of our modern world.

**Thank you for the ARC. All opinions are completely my own.**

3 stars.

This book was written to be depressing and did not add any value or knowledge into my life at all. There was nothing redeeming about the story.

The three stars are for the writing style, which was just average.

TLDR; I do not recommend this book.

Raw and challenging, Sarah Rose Etter pens a reality that we turn away from. Or rather, desensitize ourselves to by scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Ripe’s ability to so beautifully press on what plagues us new adult and millennial women as we navigate careers, hustle culture, substance abuse, complicated love lives, abortion, maternal wounds, misogyny, mental health, an ever-growing housing crisis, climate change, and the absurdity of trying to balance it all. It is always a marvel when a novel can so precisely yet uniquely reflect what we are afraid to look at in our own lives. The prose in Ripe was so devastating but memorable.

Unfortunately, it’s use of magical realism is disappointing. The dread of Cassie’s black hole is supposed to be ever present, but it feels slightly underutilized. I did anticipate more from this element of Cassie’s life. Also underutilized were both Nicole and Marie. It surprised me to find that Cassie valued either of them as friends, when as a reader, there was so little of a friendship to care about. While I understand Cassie’s isolation, it didn’t make sense for her to not at least be able to confide in Marie. Still, Ripe doesn’t disappoint as modern feminist literature and is sure to be a refreshing read.

"A horror that sharp stays with you. It's a knife lodged in the heart."

So begins Sarah Rose Etter's "Ripe", an incredibly visceral journey through the horrors of late-stage capitalism and the vast absurdities of modern life. And lodge in your heart it does, this novel of inescapable horrors that is also somehow one of the most compelling reads I've experienced all year, like a train wreck from which you cannot look away and are also potentially on the train itself watching it being steered into its oncoming obstacle from your window seat, frozen in fear.

To clarify, the train-wreck-ness of the story is purely the nature of the horrors themselves, which we experience through Cassie's close gaze, reminded inescapably of our own inevitable suffering and demise. The prose is stark and visual, the landscape familiar and yet brimming with a danger that haunts beneath the skin, the characters bordering on caricaturization only for their demeanor to slip into a shadow adjacent to our own intimate terrors. I feel as though I have read this story before, and yet I have never read anything like it.

I am truly in awe of Etter, the way she has managed to create something that rips apart one's heart so cleanly while simultaneously weaving an innately beautiful work that begs to be devoured. Once I started reading, I absolutely could not stop, and yet the unease that lurks under the surface was never far behind. This is a novel composed of contradictions, one that compels and dissuades in one fell swoop, one that absolutely needed to be written.

Though I will never be able to pinpoint how Etter has managed to create something so equally gorgeous and upsetting, I know only that I was encompassed by it, body and soul, and that I look forward to my next meeting with these strange pages, which I am sure will find me again soon.

I devoured this in a day and a half. Though a lot of this was difficult to read, it was very raw and will be very relatable to many, whether in SF/the Valley or elsewhere. I loved the tie ins of woman in tech, existential crises of 30 somethings, and of course...black holes.

The prose in this is phenomenal. It’s a raw and jarring take on depression, technology, gentrification, and the working world. I read a lot of literary fiction and have never encountered anything quite like this. Incredibly interested to see what else this authors comes up with. Check trigger warnings!

Sarah Rose Etter has completely knocked me off my feet once again. Her novel THE BOOK OF X took me by utter surprise a few years ago. so I was thrilled to get an early copy of RIPE, one of my most anticipated reads of 2023. The wait and hype was worth it.

Cassie! Oh, Cassie broke my heart. A burned-out, Silicon Valley non-believer, she is stuck at a toxic start-up in an early 2020 San Francisco. Dealing with a black hole following her for her entire life, Cassie suffers from anxiety and depression, an abusive boss, an emotionally distant family on the other side of the country, and a boyfriend who has another girlfriend. I have never seen such a vivid depiction of depressing tech startup culture. It made me so lucky to not be sucked into that world, and I spent the entire book just wishing Cassie could pull herself out.

Sarah Rose Etter has such a specific and wonderful way with words. Her writing is stunning and succinct, and always leaves such a dent. I predict this being a massive hit when it's released in July. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's going to go down as a contemporary classic for sure.

One of my favorite books this year and one of the best releases of 2023, Following The Book of X, Sarah Rose Etter brings us Ripe, an enthralling and disturbing story about the demands of the corporate world and the depression that runs deep. The story follows Cassie, a thirty-three-year-old, a year into her "glamourous" Silicon Valley job, where she is overworked, underappreciated, and looked down upon every day of her career. We understand her as a character and the demons lurking below, like a black hole. Her depression and anxiety morph into unnerving but very relatable anecdotes. While trying to stay afloat in her job and not fall for her fling, who is in a serious relationship and a pregnancy, Cassie is slowly losing herself.

This was one of the best depictions of depression I've seen in literature in a recent release. Cassie, from a young age, has an obsession with black holes that are there in the story to represent her depression, a simple analogy a lot of us endure throughout our lifetime. While depression is the focal point, the demand for corporate life and Silicon Valley culture is also an interesting part of the story. I highly recommend this to anyone and everyone when it is released.

Truly my year of rest and relaxation for the tech girlies...

Ok, I'm literally the only woman at my tech company and this book really spoke to me. It really hit with the whole moral dilemmas you're forced to face in order to get a paycheck and just simply survive. (I've been a tad existential about my job lately, so this book came at the perfect time)

The writing was superb, I really liked the organization of the story. The way the author wove in Cassie's past with her present really worked for me. And I just really enjoyed the style of writing, it was easy to fly through this book, and beautiful enough that a passage would make me pause for a moment and re-read it.

I also thought the secondary characters were filled in with just the right amount of detail. Sometimes when a book is dark and existential like this, the minor characters are kept at a distance and almost flat, but the minor characters in this colored the world perfectly.

I'm not sure if I particularly enjoyed the dictionary entries at the beginning of each chapter - they didn't feel needed to me, but the rest of the book was good enough that by half way through I didn't mind.

Sad I have to wait until July to start pushing all of my friends to read this.

I am absolutely blown away by this book. I read it weeks ago, and I think about it all the time. I can't gush enough about what this book was for me, but I'll try not to go on forever (I could!).

Ripe is a unique and introspective exploration of mental health, corporate culture, and the absurdities of modern life. The protagonist, Cassie, is a millennial woman working at a Silicon Valley startup. She is trapped in a toxic corporate culture, working long hours and dealing with unethical projects, all while trying to reconcile the stark contrast between the city's obscene wealth and abject poverty. Throughout the book, Cassie's struggles with depression and anxiety are personified by an amorphous black hole that has been her constant companion since childhood. This black hole feeds on her distress and draws her ever-closer as the world around her unravels.

As I read this book, I found myself emotionally invested in Cassie's journey. The writing style is sharp yet vulnerable, funny yet unsettling, and it made me feel like I was living the story alongside her. I found myself constantly rooting for Cassie and hoping that she would find a way to escape the toxic culture she was trapped in and overcome her mental health struggles. I came away from it feeling incredibly raw.

One of the things I loved most about this book was how it tackled the subject of mental health. The personification of Cassie's depression and anxiety through the black hole was such a unique and brilliant way of exploring this topic. It made the struggles feel real and tangible, and I think it will resonate with anyone who has ever dealt with mental health issues. It's really what sold the book once and for all to me.

Overall, I highly recommend "Ripe" to anyone who is looking for a thought-provoking and emotionally charged read. The book offers such a unique and reflective take on our shared journey through a late-capitalist hellscape, and all the bullshit that becomes collateral as a result. For my fellow cynics and my fellow depressi's this is for us.

Thanks so so much to Scribner as well as NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of Ripe ahead of its release in July 2023

What first drew me to this book was the cover. The deep dark red made me interested. I didn’t really pay too much attention to summary and it was only after I started reading the novel that I briefly looked at the summary. This is a short book but it really packs a punch and dives into some dark places. Because of the subject matter I took it slow only reading it one chapter at a time at first but at about the halfway point I couldn’t put it down. This book really made me think.

I LOVE THIS BOOK!! Sarah Rose Etter manages to write about Life As We Know It (big tech, modern dating, daughterhood...) in a wholly unique way--I don't feel like the narrator and I are simply commiserating. Abstract sci-fi set in an ever so slightly surreal reality. Relatable but refreshing. I'm so excited to be able to share this book with the bookbuying world this summer!!!!

4.5🌟

I am a sucker for books that showcase depression and anxiety that consume every waking part of someone's day to day lifestyle.

This book follow's Cassie, a Silicon Valley Tech who's life is devoured by an ominous blackhole of depression and anxiety that seems to loom over her like a dark cloud.
This book touches on the rat race that most millennials living in cities face as they enter the work force.
Humans are not designed to live this fast paced lifestyle where they feel like they can't keep up with consumer debt and advanced technology. Most people who live life this cannot achieve their goal without the help of stimulating drugs. High amounts of dopamine in an abnormal setting creates a false sense of happiness and please, but when the high comes down, the depression sets in.

Although Cassie knows she is different from the rest of the people she comes across, she still gives into this abnormal lifestyle where she is burnt out and miserable. Yet, in the morning she chooses the same lifestyle all over again.

I think that most people tend to forget that they're in charge of their own happiness and you can't find the answer to your problems through drugs and sex.
As much as Cassie thinks she's different, she is still giving into the same system that is destroying her.

Thank you to NetGalley for letting me read this!

After loving The Book of X, I had high expectations for this that unfortunately weren’t met. I hated the set up of the chapter titles as definitions and felt that it got old very quickly. I wanted more character development and backstories. The ending just kind of flopped on by as well. I did enjoy the actual story but wished there was a lot more to it.

The sort of novel I wish I’d written. A cutting, heartbreaking take on life just as COVID first started, what it was to feel like the world was dying and everyone was scared and everything seemed a little futile. This is also a searing take on corporate life against the backdrop of wildfires. It took me almost a month to finish this because of my own busy corporate job, fittingly enough. But I loved it.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC! This book is out now.