Ripe is a spot-on telling of living in modern times--when the world feels like it's ending every day and we're just expected to go on living. When our jobs become our lives, and all this work allows us to simply scrape by.

Cassie is a marketing associate at a tech company in San Francisco. This is the kind of company that gives out branded swag to its employees and expects them to wear it and buy into company culture. Cassie refers to these people as Believers, with a capital B. She is not a Believer herself, but while at work she code-switches, pretending to care about metrics and graphs while people are literally setting themselves on fire in the streets.

A black hole has followed Cassie around her whole life, from her childhood with a critical, unloving mother out west to Silicon Valley. I took this to be both a sense of foreboding and a manifestation of her depression, She also has a literal interest in black holes and physics, and Etter begins each chapter with a definition taken straight from the dictionary. I could've done without the definitions of more basic terms (work, bittersweet, daughter etc.), but that's a minor quibble. Ripe is a bleak illustration of living in a capitalistic society; while reading it, you may look up to see your own black hole above you.

Four and a half stars

• My initial interest in this book was very much a “judge a book by its cover” moment. The cover is striking and immediately caught my interest.

• Stunning cover aside, this book was a quick and thought-provoking read. It was written in a way that simultaneously exemplifies Cassie’s feelings of emptiness while being engaging and bold in its prose. The unique format of the book focuses on Cassie’s actionable present and past yet the ever-present black hole is constantly signaling how she feels at any given moment; it is beautiful, sad, and uncomfortable all at once. RIPE is already getting a lot of well-deserved buzz and will certainly be enjoyed by readers of Emily R. Austin, Mona Awad, & Melissa Broder.

Sarah Rose Etter has done it again! RIPE is a delicious and dark dive into tech culture that has so much else on its mind, from motherhood and gentrification to intimacy and the pandemic, while also grappling still with interesting questions on ethics/morality. Not to mention the black hole that Cassie was born tethered to, and which only she can see (rest assured, Etter is working in a similar vein to THE BOOK OF X).

Cassie is one year into a stint at a large tech company. The tech company is looking to gut a competitor---this is the thread I found to be most interesting, how Cassie becomes the mastermind of her employer's offensive. At the same time, Cassie has discovered she's pregnant, the father being someone not exactly available. The pandemic, naturally, is also looming.

Anyway, I loved RIPE. It felt more accessible than THE BOOK OF X, or perhaps at least made more for a commercial audience---in some ways, it felt like an improvement or growth. I can't wait to see what Etter does next!

Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley!

The Book of X is one of my absolute favourite books so I was nervous to see if I would enjoy Ripe as much but….she’s done it again!!

Sarah Rose Etter has such a talent for writing stories that explore hard, real world issues mixed with surrealism and strange elements- The Book of X explored pain and the aftermath of sexual assault while weaving in surreal elements like women born with knots in their stomachs and rivers of body parts. And with Ripe, she uses a similar formula, touching on so many current topics like homelessness, abortion, wildfires, a global virus, the cost of living crisis, capitalism and work culture, with the surreal element in this novel being a black hole that follows the main character around.

It feels like the author put all of her rage and feelings at our current world into this novel and I absolutely adored it. I can definitely see this book sitting alongside books like MYORAR, The New Me, Temporary and The Odyssey- the depressed lit girlies are going to eat this one up.

Thankyou SO much to Scribner for allowing me to read an early copy, I can’t wait to preorder my physical copy!!

Such a unique take on a young woman’s experiences living life in the tech industry while trying to make sense of the wealth disparities surrounding her.

Cassie thought she had landed her dream job with a new startup in Silicon Valley. Not everything is what it seems, though. From her observations of her out-of-touch coworkers complaining about the exotic fruit selection at meetings to the homeless man living below her window, she begins questioning the meaning of existence and where she fits into it all. Add in a strange “black hole” that seems always to be lingering around, feeding off of her anxieties, and you have one strange yet enticing novel.

While I enjoyed the premise, the main character was the star of the show. I especially enjoyed Cassie’s unusual way of looking at things. With her dry wit and somewhat disgusting observations, she is definitely a character I won’t forget; a true standout.
I highly recommend this to anyone looking for an unusual and entertaining novel.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I agree with Sarah… this one is a banger for sure!

Thanks to #NetGalley and the publisher for early access to this book in exchange for an honest review.

okay, wow. I was first drawn to this book because of the beautiful cover and then the synopsis. However, nothing prepared me for the tone of which this books is written in. This book invoked so many emotions in me. I felt second-hand embarrassment, depressed, anxious, and unsettled simply from reading the words of this book.

My favorite part of this book was the black hole allegory. A black hole follows our narrator every where she goes and always has. We see how the black hole reacts in different situations; how it grows or retracts or looms over her during certain circumstances. It gives explanation to her attitude towards work, family, relationships, and herself.

I wish I could type my thought coherently because this book was so intricate in its portrayal of emotions and sensitive topics.

I cannot wait to own a physical copy when it comes out and hopefully annotate it.

Wow. This was such a beautiful and powerful novel. "Ripe" completely took me by surprise. Of course, I was intrigued by the gorgeous, vivid cover art, but this book just took my breath away. The tone of this book is perfection. It's haunting, eerie, depressing, unsettling, and deeply profound. The whole "black hole" allegory was so dead-on. The writing was stunning. Sarah Rose Etter has a way with words. I deeply cared about Cassie. I just wanted to give her a big hug. It's amazing how far are minds and bodies are pushed to the limits when in the throes of stress and workplace pressure. I will definitely be thinking about this novel for a long time. Exquisite storytelling.

Thank you, Netgalley and Scribner for the digital ARC.

Ripe, by Sarah Rose Etter, gives us a first-person perspective on Cassie, a young woman who has moved to San Francisco to join the wave of tech on the verge of the Coronavirus pandemic. The book addresses topics ranging from anxiety, to toxic workplace culture and company ethics, to the instability and injustice of the housing crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I think the book sought to address many key topics, and while that represented the complexity of the narrative for the Bay Area, I do not feel that the book dove into the topics enough to make so many references to them (i.e., the wildfires, the COVID-19 pandemic, the unhoused). Perhaps, this was meant to be a device to illustrate the anxiety Cassie felt; however, given that other topics were explored deeply (i.e., workplace culture and ethics), I was left wanting more from the protagonist. I did not feel that her character challenged any of these topics, but instead chose to be a victim of them (which may well have been the intent of the author).

The author used a "dictionary device" throughout the book to lead readers through two key tracks of thinking - one related to anxiety (the black hole) and one related to a pomegranate (withholding for spoilers). I found that this gave me a "clue" of what was to come, but did not feel that it added to the story in a meaningful way. It may have been more useful to pick either the black hole definitions (this felt more "mature" as a concept) as opposed to the fruit references instead of pursuing both.

go and immediately put this on your 2023 TBR & then come back to read the rest of this.

holy moly. I was stoked when I got the approval for this on net galley so thanks much to @scribnerbooks for blessing me with this. so beautifully written & I couldn’t put it down.

a story of a woman with a black hole that’s followed her as long as she can remember . always lurking there and reacting.

and that same woman working a soul sucking, corporate job in Silicon Valley (in early 2020 although that’s not stated outright).

just the general format is something I haven’t seen before - the definitions, personal reflection and then real time plot. it was so well thought out & you can tell that on first read.

there are so many little details weaved throughout and I can’t even begin to describe them because the novel has blown my mind👩‍🍳💋

I don’t do this often with galley reads but I cannot wait to own a hard copy of this and tuck it right on my shelf next to Moshfegh and Rooney.

pub date: July 11, 2023 (write that down)

I read this book in a day, so it's safe to say it's well-written and compelling. The Moshfegh comparison feels apt. I appreciate the creativity that went into the structure and style of the novel and found the definitions to be a nice touch. I appreciated seeing the protagonist go into the abortion decision and survive it (something media can be notoriously bad about) and I liked the relationship the protagonist had with her dad. The detail about him working at the supermarket in her hometown felt very poignant to me.

I wish I could say I loved this book, but something about it just didn't click for me. I noticed there were almost no positive descriptions of women in this book, and the protagonist displayed much more empathy and compassion toward men than women. Certainly, plenty of women do feel and think this way, and that's an interesting narrative approach, but it didn't feel especially fresh here. This also felt like a book where things happened to the narrator and she made few choices (the abortion being the exception, plus quitting her job at the very end) and leaned into the wallowing. Again, I think this is a fine choice.

Perhaps the efforts that went into the unhoused population--including someone right outside her window--linger for me in a difficult way. Rents are high and the protagonist is overworked, but she never really answers why she doesn't move elsewhere. We get some mixed messages about her family's financial background, and the protagonist insists she and her tech friend are in the "middle" of SF economy, but she seems pretty solid to me. It also was never clear to me if her mom had a spending problem or not; we're told she has student loans, but we're also told she went to an in-state college on a scholarship and that her parents paid for some. So did dad actually need to work at the grocery store or not? Who knows! But for all the descriptions of unhoused people circling around the protagonist, I started to wonder why I didn't get to read a story about their life and not the familiar tech one before me.

All of this said, I'm sure plenty of folks are going to love this book. It has that very Cool Girl feel to it, and it has some gorgeous sentences. It's an enjoyable read, and ag