“You have to betray yourself first in order for anyone else to betray you.” This book was so gut-wrenching, so powerful and made me feel so many things that I’m still processing at the moment.

One of my favorite reads so far this year!

This book has a lot in common with The Book of X, starting with symbolic representations of a woman's body/mental state - the former deals in knots while Ripe dives into black holes. Both cover the messiness of love between a mother and daughter, between the protagonist and a lover. Both weave definitions and lists of facts into the narrative.

While the foundations are familiar, the landscape here is new and that makes all the difference. Aside from a change of scenery, Ripe has a larger cast of characters and is more grounded in reality than The Book of X with one big exception.

I recommend reading when you're feeling fed up with your job.

I loved this book! I really enjoyed the writing and the overall topic. I felt like this was comparable to My Rest and Relaxation (and other Moshfegh books) but in a modern tech feeling. I thought it was clever and felt very real. the formatting of this was so creative with the beginning of the chapters with definitions, the different areas of her life, and her own reflection. Such an awesome book.

I was looking for something different to cleanse my pallet between my usual genre of thrillers and boy did this deliver.

We follow our female MC Cassie. She works at a tech startup company. Her boss is snarky, condescending, and just plain rude. She’s stuck working long hours in a toxic work environment, that is also having her do things that go against her morals. We can all relate to that in some way or another…LOL. She is struggling to keep her head above water. Between her toxic job, her boyfriend, who isn’t really her boyfriend because he’s in an open relationship with someone else, rising rent/cost of living, and recently finding out she may be pregnant. She is basically living a fake it til you make it type of life. She isn’t really her true self with anyone. She has a fake self that deals with her boss, coworkers, few close friends, family, and boyfriend.

Despite being pretty much alone, there is a miniature black hole that follows her everywhere ever since she can remember. It shrinks and grows depending upon what’s going on in her life. Threatening to shallow her into the dark abyss at a moment’s notice it seems. The black hole seemed to just pull everything together. We have all felt like there was this looming darkness around us, threatening to swallow us whole, at one point or another.

This book really does capture what it’s like to be part of corporate America. It was so dark, unsettling, realistic and strangely comedic to me. As someone who struggles with depression, anxiety, and workplace woes, it really hit close to home for me. I very much enjoyed the journey it took me on.

Thank you Sarah Rose Etter, NetGalley, and Scribner for the ARC of this book!

Loved this book and the style of writing. A quick, propulsive read which deals with the dark side of the tech industry, specifically in Silicon Valley, plus the biting reality of depression/anxiety. This is definitely a gloomy read, but I feel the author brilliantly captured a mental health spiral. I also appreciated the way she portrayed abortion.

My only complaint would be the heavy-handed use of the black hole imagery, which was important, but perhaps not necessary as often as it appeared on the page.

This is a very raw and dark literary piece of fiction. I would not recommend to those currently struggling with depression, as it may be triggering.

I was extremely impressed with this novel, and will be looking forward to more from this author. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Wow, this sucked me in. I loved the structure of this book, as well as, its message. In a world glittering with instant gratification, is it only our disconnect that fully frees us? This book sheds light on toxic Silicon Valley, its perverted ethos on work, and how it exploits people of color and women. The ending felt rush but I appreciated this book.

- RIPE is one of those books that's satire, but only just barely. I work in marketing, and though luckily I've never had this horrific a job, I see elements from the larger field taken to their logical endpoints all over this book.
- I loved the slight fantastical element of the black hole that follows Cassie around. I'm not sure the device got used to its full potential, but it kept the book from being simply a rote recitation of horrors.
- Although I think the black hole plot thread and the dictionary definition framing device didn't quite work as well as intended, we do a love a book where a character gets an ab0rtion simply because she just cannot have a child right now.

Ripe is a horrifically stunning comment on capitalism and the mental health of adults in the United States. The main character Cassie shows you the honest realities of living in California, where the difference between the haves and the have-nots is at an all-time high. This book contains many dense mental health topics I would caution people about before picking this one up. However, I thought this book was brilliant and a must-read for anyone!

Writing so crisp you almost forget how horrendously relatable this meditation on late-stage capitalism, depression, the inversion and ultimate loss of self, and isolation truly is.

While the writing style wasn't for me, I understand the hype for Ripe.

Ripe tells the story of a woman navigating the post-grad world of Silicon Valley.

I think that fans of Otessa Moshfegh and literary fiction will love this one. It's realistic, tense, and dreamy.

This book is stressful and weird. The MC, Cassie, is literally followed around by a black hole as if it’s her own personal little storm cloud. San Francisco appears to be a futuristic, sparkly Mecca of achievement but there are other disturbing, violent things going on beneath the surface. The biggest example of this being the man who sets himself on fire right in front of Cassie on the street one day. We don’t know the reason, but based on Cassie’s life the man likely worked an office job similar to hers. We follow along as her own daily grind becomes all the more tedious and demanding, taking a toll on her physically and emotionally. As the black hole above her pulses and expands, is she destined for her own blaze?

The writing shifts effortlessly between moments of beautiful, moving prose and dark, biting humor that feels like something out of a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. (Examples: the way Cassie’s coworkers and “friends” speak to each other, a flashback to her parents fighting at the dinner table that is strangely hilarious, etc.) At one point, Cassie says to someone: “I’m sorry, this city is fucking a nightmare.” And I’m PRETTY sure that’s a typo but to be honest, it might not be.

The more I experienced of Cassie’s bittersweet memories and her absolute Hellscape of a job, the more I felt for her. She absolutely does some things to make her less sympathetic, but I could relate so deeply to all the passages about Cassie feeling like she was losing her life and her identity to the soul-sucking obligation of work, and how lonely and sad that felt. Plus, this book has that whole depressed and annoyed narrator vibe that I LOVE.

"Ripe" does a fantastic job of dipping its toes into magical realism without going too far. (The black hole thing is a neat element throughout the story and feels organic to the plot.) The ending is a bit open to interpretation but I have my own theories. This was an easy 5-star read for me!

Trigger Warnings: Parental abuse, abortion, misogyny, substance abuse

Sarah Rose Etter is like the queen of the surreal, of manifesting our deepest darkest feelings into a physical reality that is impossible to ignore. If you’ve been around here for a while, you know I fell in love with her debut novel, THE BOOK OF X, back in 2019. Thoughts of it still rear up in the back of my brain weekly. This follow up has been getting all the buzz and critical acclaim, for good reason, exposing her writing to a larger audience.

What all these reviews are talking about is late-stage capitalism and the pressures of corporate culture and the pitfalls of modern society. Which is right on target, all of it, as the book is about a young woman sucked into the machine of what she thought was her Silicon Valley dream job. And, oh yeah, she’s followed around by the physical manifestation of her depression as a black hole of varying size that always hovers nearby. There’s that.

But what I want to talk about here is the personal. Etter has an innate sense of how to capture complex emotions on the page. Perhaps her greatest strength is the ability to make her reader feel, to put into words the dark truths that come along with the human experience, to make a connection with readers who have shared experiences. Reading this gave me the same feeling I get when I think about how big the universe is, and how small I am in comparison, then allow the darkness to start creeping in.

She makes some cool stylistic choices here too, most notably framing the story with definitions at the beginning of each section and chapter. This sets the tone, provide insight and background, and parses out the story as the narrative moves forward. Repetition is also used to good effect throughout.

So, who would I recommend this one to? My fellow dark and twisty bookworms. Those who know what it feels like to sit in the darkness. Those who question how the world got here and where it is going but still keep putting one foot in front of the other despite the chaos.

Thank you to Scribner and NetGalley for the arc!

What a ride! The physical and metaphorical tension throughout this novel is delightful and grotesque. There were so many moments in this where I had to sit back and reflect on what I had just come face to face with. This book captured what it feels like to be a woman working in a horrifying late-stage capitalist society with such precision that it left me speechless. This is a new favorite for me!

I highly recommend this to anyone who is a fan of Ling Ma or Otessa Moshfegh's writing style. I especially recommend this to anyone looking to find a way to describe the weight of a "black hole" looming over you.

Overall, 4.75/5 stars

DNF. This book was WAY too hard to get into. TW: Drugs. And the whole discussion about "The Hole". It was too sci-fi for me and weird.

I have it a 1 for the cool cover.

Big NO for me.

Published by Scribner on July 11, 2023

An insecure young woman named Cassie moves to San Francisco, gets a job in the tech world, rents an apartment she can’t afford, uses coke to keep up with work that doesn’t seem terribly demanding, is disparaged by co-workers because she doesn’t possess skills that her job doesn’t require, and spends most of her time thinking about the black hole that hovers over her existence. She stresses about wildfires and Covid-19 and a missed period. She stresses about whether to have an abortion. Maybe some readers will relate to Cassie and appreciate Ripe for that reason. I enjoyed Sarah Rose Etter’s writing style despite its forced cleverness but found little about the story to be fresh or engaging.

Cassie was essentially booted out of her house by parents who likely grew weary of her moodiness. She moved to San Francisco and took a job as the head writer for a marketing team at a “unicorn startup” that gathers data “to target users and drive them to make purchases online.” She is working in that position when the novel starts, although Etter supplies flashbacks to her backstory.

Cassie’s CEO wants to destroy their largest competitor. To that end, he gleefully accepts Cassie’s proposal to hire a hacker to cause a massive data breach that will irreparably injure the competitor’s reputation. Cassie doesn’t seem to have any ethical standard that would drive her away from such sleazy business tactics, much less prevent her from suggesting them. Nor does she have a sufficient sense of self-worth to stand up to co-workers who undermine her to promote their own advancement.

None of this makes Cassie an attractive character. Had she found motivation to change her life for the better, the novel might have had merit as a story of redemption. The bleak ending reflects the reality of a bleak life, but it’s difficult to feel much sympathy for a young woman with a six figure salary whose problems don’t compare to those of the homeless people she steps over on her way to her overpriced apartment. (She refuses to share with roommates to cut her expenses, another example of her unwillingness to implement simple solutions to problems that would be easy to address if she focused first on overcoming her depression.)

Etter begins chapters with definitions of words (black hole, family, intimacy, betrayal) and offers examples of how the words define her life. That’s modestly clever, even if Etter’s reliance on the gimmick seems a bit forced by the novel’s end. Etter’s dark humor, including her depiction of the unethical startup, is inconsistently amusing but unconvincing. Cassie’s CEO is a stereotype and therefore unworthy of mockery. Her co-workers are stereotypes of backbiters climbing the ladder of success. Cassie’s lover is a stereotype of a guy in an open relationship who just uses women for sex (although he actually seems like a nicer guy than the stereotype would suggest). None of the characters, apart from Cassie, feel authentic.

Cassie regularly reports about the status of her black hole. When she’s having a pleasant (usually sexual) experience, it shrinks. When she’s stressed, it expands. Usually it’s expanding. It would be difficult to find a more obvious metaphor for depression than a black hole. From time to time, Cassie explains superficial facts about black holes that she has discovered in her research. Maybe those facts advance the metaphor but they add little to the story. Etter’s repeated use of a pomegranate as a metaphor is at least more interesting than the black hole, although I never quite understood what a pomegranate is supposed to represent.

Images of pain and death pervade the story. Cassie sees someone set himself on fire. Homeless people are howling. Men are “split open on the train tracks.” All of this foreshadows a dark ending — literally dark, given the presence of a black hole that swallows all light and hope.

Etter makes shallow observations like “Love is just as painful as its absence” but we’ve heard that before, haven’t we? Cassie has a real self and a fake self (maybe a riff on T.S. Eliot). She has issues with her parents. She’s undermined at work by co-workers seeking to pull themselves up by pulling her down. Abortion protestors try to shame her. All of these scenes have been done to death in fiction. There is nothing new or fresh in Ripe.

It’s important to understand that depression is a serious disease that overcomes the ability to find a reason to live. I get it. At the same time, it is difficult to find value in the bleak story of a woman who is capable of functioning in the world but incapable of making even a rudimentary effort to overcome her depression. In the absence of original storytelling, I can’t recommend the novel, even for its sharp prose.

NOT RECOMMENDED

This is a tense and harrowing novel that tackles issues of mental health, the obsessive culture of tech workplaces, income inequality, and more. The writing is lyrical and searing, and the author used an interesting format ("definitions" of key words) to delve into the past, internal feelings, and possible futures. The use of the black hole as a metaphorical (or not so metaphorical) comment on anxiety and depression could have been overdone but definitely wasn't. The combination of horrors of late-stage capitalism, climate change, and income inequality (all in the weeks leading up to the pandemic) really worked well to create the atmosphere of a dystopian present.

This is a literary book. The main character, Cassie is a young woman working in Silicon Valley. She is lonely in a new city while working in a high pressure environment. The author uses the metaphor of blackholes throughout the book. It is fitting to the thoughts and actions of Cassie. This is a book that caused me to sit and ponder what I read after completing. It’s not one that I immediately liked but the more I reflect on it, I understand what the author was doing.

I was sent a digital advanced readers copy of this book by the publisher, Scribner via Netgalley.

It took me a bit to get into this, but once I did it was easy to read. I think many people working in tech or startups will find this relatable with employees being overworked and expected to constantly work harder and harder. Luckily, I haven't experienced it in the tech/startup world, but I have experienced it outside of that world.
It was very dark, but also funny how accurate and relatable a lot of the workplace scenes were. I can see this being a dark comedy if they decide to adapt it.

Rating: 4.5

For the fans of Woman vs The Void, Ripe will more than deliver. These types of books have a tendency to come across matter of the fact and void of emotion, which is expected when dealing with a main character dealing with depression. However from start to finish this book had me feeling emotional. I’ve been in a months long Reading slump and yet I finished this book in under 24 hours.

We have all had jobs that suck us dry, bosses who abuse us, a significant other who treats us badly or a troubled family life. As a way to cope with it we develop a fake persona of ourselves.

This is the story of a woman who finally gives it all up and lets the black hole that’s been following her since birth consume her.

This was such a unique novel! It felt like such a visceral reading experience. I thoroughly enjoyed the exploration of mental health, toxic work culture, and childhood trauma. Plus I always love a book set in the Bay Area!