“There is safety in metaphors. The truth is far more terrifying: Black holes are confrontations with the collapse of space and time. They are a reckoning with both the infinite and death, two forces that always hover above me, never letting me out of their sight.”

ripe by sarah rose etter, serves as a strong, twisting commentary on the unethical environments and values of the corporate world, bringing these extremities to light through the following of the daily life of the protagonist Cassie who works for a major tech corporation in Silicon Valley.

the corporate world is cutthroat. there’s the competition, the upholding of work ethic, abusive environments, unaffordable living conditions, lack of down time - the list goes on. but to have a job, to exist within this sophisticated world, one must feel grateful. i appreciate etter’s take on how one survives an environment like that of Cassie’s, the need to split oneself into two, the disassociation in order to manage the cumbersome workload that never seems to end, and will never receive recognition for. the extremely abusive environment to which Cassie experiences seems to point the finger at these large tech companies where performance of the company is valued much higher than human needs, the humans that run it. unfortunately this is most likely a reality for many trying to make it in the tech world. one does whatever they can to survive and perform. but burnout is real and there is only so much one can take until they resort to unhealthy methods in an attempt to uphold their responsibilities. it can feel impossible.

we watch cassie painfully succumb to this very natural burnout, the constant fight of validating the harmful treatment just because of a highly-coveted position dwindling as the dark truth to this way of life grows until it cannot be ignored.

there are “two possible outcomes if you enter a black hole: you may be ripped to shreds, or there is a slim chance you will cross into another space and time, another dimension.” so what will it be?

Sarah Rose Etter's Ripe was a panic attack on speed. This story, both all-too anxiously, heartbreakingly real, and yet vaguely, weirdly magical realist, follows Cassie from the cruelly competitive environment of her Silicon Valley tech/marketing job to her home life, which includes toxic, terrible friends, an occasional lover that technically belongs to someone else, and a long-distance relationship with her parents that does more harm than good. And while we follow Cassie, so too does the ever-expanding black hole that's accompanied her for her whole life. Cassie's loneliness and desolation --and that of the city she lives in--are captured in the author's lush. dreamy prose and there are passages in which I forgot for a moment that I was reading about characters who are profoundly unhappy, who deeply hate themselves. At the heart of this story is the question, "How does anyone bear themselves?" And the end shows us, in the starkest manner possible, that they simply don't.

Thank you Scribner for my Netgalley copy of RIPE by Sarah Rose Etter, out now!

Apologies if this is not the most coherent review as I finished this doped up on pain pills after my breast reduction lmao. Ripe follows a woman named Cassie who is a year into her ‘dream job’ at a cutthroat Silicon Valley start-up, where Ivy League grads complain about their limited snack options in a multi-million dollar building overlooking the bay filled with unhoused people bathing in the sea and setting themselves on fire.

As we follow Cassie through long hours, toxic bosses and unethical projects many look the other way for to nab a paycheck, a literal black hole follows her around as a manifestation of her anxiety and depression. Suddenly, Cassie finds herself pregnant, we witness her life swirl into disarray in the middle of a capitalistic hellscape.

I liked this book a lot. It’s obscenely readable. The tone is very depressing, eerie and sinister. If you’re looking for a hopeful read, this is not the one lol. I really think the book could have gone more into her pregnancy and how corporate life ignores the strifes of expecting women, often adding boatlads of stress and anxiety to what is supposed to be a happy and exciting time for those wanting a child.

The prose is as engaging and enticing as the cover, and if you’re looking for a narrator dredging through the trenches of capitalism with thoughts of emptiness, give this banger a read.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for this Advanced Readers Copy of Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter!

I am still thinking about this ending. In a world where burnout and putting work before yourself seems sometimes glamorous, this is the perfect response. Ripe will leave you with the unsettling feeling of what happens when we snap and can’t take it anymore.

Sometimes I get a book on Netgalley and I can tell within a couple of pages that unfortunately, in spite of the marketing, this book is just not my thing. It might even be a good book, but for whatever reason, it's not going to appeal to me.

This book is not that book. It should have been exactly my thing: a voicy, internally driven literary novel with a speculative edge, speaking to the social issues of our time.

Except it's really, really bad.

I've got three main problems with this book:

1) I think the quality of the prose is poor.

2) There's a black hole following the main character around, which is obviously just a heavy-handed metaphor for depression, but still, it sounds neat! Except that the implications of having a black hole following you around aren't dealt with at all. For example, it has NO GRAVITATIONAL PULL. The narrator throws around a lot of details about black holes, but none of them are exemplified in the black hole that's actually in the text; for example, at one point she talks about the temperature of black holes as being very hot on the outside and very cold on the inside, but what is the temperature of her black hole? We don't know. What are its physical characteristics, and how do they affect her and the people around her? They don't. What does the black hole do? Answer: Nothing. Except at the end, where she finally walks into it, because no one could see that one coming.

3) This book is, I think, supposed to be a send-up of late-stage capitalism, exemplified in the protagonist's terrible tech job and lack of $$$. Here's the thing, though: For the most part, people work savage hundred-hour weeks for the cash, and in this character's case, it doesn't pay her enough cash to live. So she's getting literally nothing out of this. She's working a terrible job that she hates, that takes up all her time including weekends, where the people are cruel to her, where she regularly does things she finds reprehensible, and she's still draining down her savings and having panic attacks over money because the job doesn't pay her enough to make rent. I spent the whole book wondering, Why doesn't she just quit and do something else?, and the book never bothered to answer this question, I guess because I'm just supposed to take at face value that people want to work in Silicon Valley even though it's bad?

I'm sorry! Normally I try at this point to say nice things about the book, or say "However, I think it will appeal to X audiences because Y," but I can't say that here. I guess all I can say is that (a) at least it's short, and (b) I've seen it buzzed everywhere so I guess at least it's appealing to some people, but I myself couldn't tell you why.

I received an eARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

ripe by sarah rose etter
4.5/5⭐️’s

“before it was applied to marble statues and women, the word beauty began as a word for objects, or for the light from god, or for a point in time, e.g., the moment a fruit was perfectly ripe. there are moments i am perfectly ripe, too, moments when i am the fruit bursting with the reddest of seeds.”

ripe plunges us into the chaotic world of cassie, a young woman who has traded her small-town existence for the high stakes, high stress life of silicon valley's tech industry. cassie is struggling to maintain balance in every aspect of her life while she coexists with the ever present black hole that follows her, a second shadow.

“my mother stung and stung. her words stung. her fury stung. her palm stung across my skin. i think it was then that i learned some part of love must be the stinging.”

i ventured into this book blind, save for its comparison to “my year of rest and relaxation” and “her bodies and other parties”. i was pleasantly surprised by the unique narrative format; the writing is filled with nuance and laced with remarkable prose. ripe is a feisty testament to human emotions and the pressures of modern life that i found both profoundly relatable and melancholic. for those wanting to slice into the rawness of life, read this!!

A short read, but pretty compelling!! The protagonist was interesting to follow and I enjoyed the way the author switches between flashbacks and present-day events. The way most of the details about her life were kept vague was also a very interesting storytelling device—it was easy to stay in her head during the story. Overall, this is a fascinating, well-structured story and I would definitely be interested in buying a finished copy!

Oof, this was bleak.

I loved the writing, it was incisive and direct. The setting was horrid, the characters were awful, and overall this likely reflects a reality that’s a bit too close to home for a lot of people.

Persephone in a capitalistic hellscape is so unique, conceptually to me. I have only ever read Persephone retellings in the romance genre so to see it in literary fiction and to give her this new ending? I ate it up.

Overall, I think Ripe is joining the ranks of other anti-capitalist books but not through a main character who is fighting against the norm but rather through a character who tries to make it work and ultimately realizes it’s not worth it. Perhaps it’ll inspire us to save ourselves before we reach an untimely demise.

beautifully written and uniquely structured, this should’ve been perfect for me but i just never connected with it as much as i hoped. even though it’s a pretty short novel i felt like there was a bit too much going on

I ended up DNFing this after reading 30% of it. I wasn't a fan of the main character's passivity or the black hole plot device. The definitions included throughout the book took away from the reading experience--in my opinion. I do still harbor some interest in seeing how the story turns out, so I may revisit it at a later date. It just wasn't something that I was interested in finishing at this time.

The story of Ripe follows our exhausted and beaten-down narrator named Cassie. Cassie is a magnet for being mistreated and taken advantage of by the people around her: her mother, her boss, her friends, her lover, etc. After taking a leap of faith and leaving her hometown behind, she finds herself in San Francisco, where the wealthy and the impoverished struggle to coexist. Cassie must do her best to jump over hurdle after hurdle, whether it be an abusive boss or an accidental pregnancy.

Ripe does a fantastic job of showing how bleak a woman’s life can be within the corporate world and a capitalistic society that shows no mercy to those who uphold it. Cassie works like a dog for a company that does not value her in any capacity: constantly being talked down to, insulted, and never receiving credit and appreciation for her contributions. On top of the commentary on the wealthy living alongside abject poverty, Etter effectively shows how depressing life under capitalism can be.

I also liked how Etter showed how some people can thrive under these conditions despite all odds. It almost exacerbated Cassie’s misery because it showed that happiness in this life is possible for some people, just not her. Whether these people were actually happy or not is up for debate anyway.

Another thing that Etter does well is forcing you to feel Cassie’s anxiety as she encounters obstacle after obstacle. Cassie's anxiety was something she could see, hear, and smell which strengthened the effect on readers.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to those who feel small and powerless under an unforgiving economic system or even those who want a sad read.

"Their pulses thrum from stocks, driverless cars, phones that collect the data of their lives in digital dashboards reporting: songs listened to, steps taken, places visited, workouts completed, hours slept."

Ouch.

Sarah Rose Etter certainly has her finger on the pulse of technology culture. Observations like the above fill her novel Ripe, set in the Bay Area. Cassie lives in San Francisco, where she steps over the homeless on the train to work at tech company Voyager in Silicon Valley, where she watches the homeless bathe in the bay from her office window while her coworkers, aka Believers, "nameless young people who prop up the whole industry" complain about the free snacks.

Cassie has the boss from hell, a jerk for a boyfriend, a job she dislikes (at best), a horrible mother, tragic friends to party with in the city, and, oh yeah a black hole that follows her around, growing and pulsing in sync with her moods.

The wit is scathing, the humor laugh out loud funny.

"I roll my eyes up to the roof of my skull. She can’t see my face, but it feels good, this act of rebellion. “I know you’re rolling your eyes, you stoned asshole. Don’t fuck up my dinner party.” I am so high that I let her say it without any fuss."

As the tension escalates we're really invested in how Cassie navigates through life. We're in her corner. I liked this book a lot, even if it was a little too close to home.

My thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the ARC. Ripe was published in July 2023.

Cassie's journey, fraught with disillusionment and a sense of stagnation, strikes a chord with many of us who have experienced similar feelings. I must admit that the book hit a little too close to home for comfort. At times, I found myself confronting my own unease about the direction of my life. While this may be a testament to the author's ability to create relatable content, it also left me feeling a tad disconcerted. Overall, "Ripe" is a commendable and relevant exploration of millennial malaise.

𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒓 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒕𝒆 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒄 𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒃𝒖𝒅𝒔 𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒓𝒊𝒅𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍 𝒍𝒊𝒇𝒆, 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒓 𝒇𝒂𝒄𝒆𝒔 𝒃𝒖𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒓 𝒔𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒆𝒏𝒔. 𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒅𝒐 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒔𝒑𝒆𝒂𝒌 𝒐𝒓 𝒎𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒆𝒚𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒂𝒄𝒕. 𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒂𝒓𝒆𝒏’𝒕 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚 𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆. 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒊𝒏 𝒊𝒔 𝒇𝒖𝒍𝒍 𝒐𝒇 𝒉𝒖𝒔𝒌𝒔.

Glittering wealth while stewing in the reality of poverty and suffering, how does a young woman find joy working her dream job at a Silicon Valley start-up with the ugly truth begging to be acknowledged? Worse, there is a black hole that hovers above Cassie, only she can see it, “𝐼𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑒. 𝐼𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 ℎ𝑎𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛.” She is choking on loneliness and terror, numbing herself to the scenes outside her apartment, men on fire, people living in dirty tents, defecation in the streets, human beings eating out of dumpsters, boarded up failed businesses, while she rubs shoulders with the believers (Ivy League techies) trying to pass herself off as successful, grab the dream and ‘strike gold’, rising above her class.

Getting there isn’t even half the battle, it’s like being put through the grinder, pushing and pushing to keep up, feeling bloodless until it takes substances to maintain oneself on fifteen-hour days. If the black hole is strongest when she is alone, might it swallow her? Where does this joy sucker come from? Cassie’s depression lends an ominous fog to the challenges of her career. The detachment surrounding her is a shocking reality, feeding the black hole. Her mother’s sting has left a sadness in her, and the line, “𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝: 𝑎 𝑚𝑢𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙 ℎ𝑖𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔,” no one to reach out to and confide in about this black hole, and it’s no wonder it threatens. Her father wants her to rocket to success, escape the ‘nothing’ of their town, but how good is it for her soul? Is her future truly bright, is this what she wants? What she thought she wanted, this ripe fruit of success, is rotting before her eyes. Her choices are molding her into someone she doesn’t want to be. Conflicting realities haunt her. Some choices are more serious than others. What do we betray when we betray ourselves?

This story is a clash between how we think things should be, in the light (or dark) of what truly is. It is a heavy read, watching Cassie sink into her fake self, wrestling with what the godly CEO (being acknowledged by him like a holy experience) demands and what is morally right. He is someone who doesn’t need to weigh morality or legalities, what does any of it matter? Why is she ‘𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘺 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘯'? Add an unexpected pregnancy, no one to turn to as she falls apart, this beautiful dream leaving her washed ashore upon a wasteland while only the black hole seems to be the only thing staring back.

Sarah Rose Etter is a hell of a writer, 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐵𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝑜𝑓 𝑋 was just as original and made me a fan so maybe I am biased. This is a story that pulls the reader into the horrors of the tuned-out world, where it’s often about selling yourself out or coming to nothing. I felt dread for her, when her dad was pushing and reminding her this is what she should want, there is nothing else, this is success! He means well, he doesn’t want her to be stocking shelves in a dead town but is this really the way up? Whose dream is this?

Yes, read it.

Published July 11, 2023

Scribner

"Ripe" by Sarah Rose Etter is a raw and unapologetic exploration of the corporate dystopia that is Silicon Valley. Through the eyes of Cassie, a young woman trapped in a cutthroat start-up, the novel delves deep into the toxic underbelly of a world defined by obscene wealth and social inequality.

Etter's vivid prose captures the paradoxical existence of Silicon Valley, where high-rise offices overlook the suffering of unhoused individuals, and material success contrasts sharply with personal despair. Cassie's journey feels all too relatable as she grapples with the demands of a soul-crushing job and the emotional turmoil brought on by her miniature black hole, a manifestation of her depression and anxiety.

The author's ability to blend sharp wit with vulnerability creates a compelling narrative that pulls readers into the heart of Cassie's struggles. As she unexpectedly becomes pregnant amidst her CEO's unethical demands, the novel confronts the choices women face in a world that often seems designed to chew them up and spit them out.

"Ripe" is a haunting portrayal of modern life, masterfully painting a picture of late-capitalist hellscape. Etter's darkly comic approach exposes the absurdities of our society, leaving readers simultaneously unsettled and contemplative. The book serves as a poignant critique of the consequences of unchecked ambition and the cost of success in a world dominated by corporate greed.

Interesting and well written I just personally couldn’t get into the story. Difficult to follow at times and a little slow. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Ripe is a thrilling and unsettling examination of what it is to live in a world that centers work above all else. I found myself relating so much to the narrator that it felt as though I was being consumed by the book. Do you ever read a novel and think, “this is real, this is happening right now?” That’s this book, brilliantly and nauseatingly.

Ripe is a captivating and thought-provoking read that depicts Cassie's deep sense of emptiness. The author's engaging and bold prose truly brings the story to life, showcasing the book's unique format that skillfully alternates between Cassie's present and past experiences. However, what truly adds to the poignancy of the narrative is how the ever-present black hole consistently mirrors Cassie's emotions in every passing moment. It's a hauntingly beautiful yet undeniably sad and somewhat discomforting journey.

OK, this review might seem a little dark but bear with me.

Have you ever heard a medical practitioner describe one symptom of anxiety and/or depression as an "impending sense of doom"? Well, this is book is pretty much that notion personified. Cassie is barely scraping by living in San Francisco, even though she is constantly working at her tech job (often aided by drugs to do so), her rent is astronomical thereby forcing her to shop at discount grocery stores with questionable products, and her boss is constantly telling her she isn't doing enough. Also, she's seeing a man in an open relationship, she might be pregnant, and her rent was just increased AGAIN. Oh, and to top it all off a "black hole" (aka the impending sense of doom) follows her like storm cloud. One more thing -- did I mention that COVID is coming?

Now that we have THAT out of the way, I still really enjoyed this book. The writing is fantastic and the author put so much work into showing the juxtaposition of San Francisco and the people living and working in the city. I had a hard time with the definitions at every chapter and the "e.g." format at first -- probably because I was mostly listening to the book, but I came to enjoy it once I understood the cadence of the book.

Thank you Net Galley Scribner for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review!

4 stars.