In Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, Cassie is working at a Silicon Valley at a start up. However, she is trying to survive the chaos of the city, her anxiety and depression, and her absolutely draining job. When Cassie realizes that she's pregnant and her boss is asking her to plan illegal attacks on their biggest competitor, Cassie starts to question whether she really wants to stay.
I could not put this book down. I loved the writing and the descriptions of the black hole that follows Cassie around.

Sarah Rose Etter LOVES tragic female characters with mommy issues..... Same girl.

RIPE was everything I wanted to be and more. Dark and devastatingly despairing, it offers a crushing yet true narrative about the fallacy of the American Dream. Cassie is struggling in a capitalistic hellscape but when you look through a narrower lens, she is just as complicit as the people around her. The black hole serves as a really interesting metaphor, threatening to swallow her whole as her emotions swell.

Etter's prose and structure is magical and well thought out. I was so entranced in the world that created. She writes with an eeriness that makes our modern world look dystopian - like you can't believe this would take place on our planet. But when you pull back the curtain, this is the exact world we are living in today.

I was so eager to read this book, as I worked for many years in Silicon Valley’s tech market. The description of the novel as “darkly comic” and an “incisive look at the absurdities of modern life” lead me to a certain impression of the book’s style. The book does describe the fast-pace, hard-driving work style of Silicon Valley tech companies. And it does center on a woman named Cassie, who is good at her job, but struggles with depression, which is a topic worthy of exploration in literary fiction as it reflects society’s experiences. Other societal issues are introduced, including toxic work situations, work/life extreme imbalance, affordable housing, anti-abortion right-wingers, casual drug use and more.

For me, this book had no likable characters. I found the work personnel almost caricature-like in their horribleness. Cassie’s friends and social choices were very concerning. Although Cassie tried to stick up for herself a few times, there was no true path to redemption, whether with therapeutic input or help from family/friends/colleagues. Besides being very depressing, I felt the definitions at the start of each chapter and the visual “black cloud” representations to be amateurish. Unfortunately, this book was a miss for me. 1.5 stars rounded up. Pub date 7/11/23. 304 pages.

Thank you, Scribner Books, Simon and Schuster, and NetGalley, for providing an eARC for review consideration. All opinions expressed are my own.

@netgalley

Thirty-three-year-old Cassie lives in San Francisco, where business are boarded up, the city has gone downhill and a virus is spreading. She has worked in Silicon Valley for the past year at Voyager, a highly valued data-mining startup. She is dedicated to making money and to pushing past what she describes as the black hole, her word for the melancholic depression that takes over. When her CEO sits his employees down and asks them if they’re willing to do whatever it takes to take down their competitors, no matter what, she joins with little hesitation. This is a character-driven workplace novel that is comprised of dark humor, social satire, often bleak and always razor sharp. Thank you to NetGalley and to Scribner for the advanced Review copy.

Sarah Rose Etter’s first book, The Book of X, has been on my TBR for awhile after seeing many great reviews so I was eager to pick up her latest novel Ripe. The cover alone is enough to make a fruit obsessed reader like me buy it. But beyond the amazing cover, I feel like this book was written for me. Cassie has just moved away from her home town at 33 and is waiting for the truth of her life to crack open while she starts a new job in ruthless Silicon Valley. With her on this journey is a black hole that has been with her for as long as she can remember, swelling on her darkest days, most powerful when she is alone and staying small when she is around others.

This is a book full of metaphors, the most prominent being the black hole that is always by her side, hanging above her shoulder, expanding and contracting in accordance with her ups and downs, highs and lows, times of stress and calm. It’s size is constantly shifting and mirroring the ache inside of her or diminishing when she is not alone. It is such a well done and extremely relatable metaphor, and worked especially well as a metaphor for depression, a sadness she had known her entire life.

I also see this as a really solid representation of the transition between youth and adulthood and all of the best and (mostly) worst aspects of this period in life. There are so many expectations tied into this post-college phase of life and more often than not the reality is difficult and disappointing. I also loved the relationship with the main character's Dad. He was such a hard ass but also her biggest supporter and I found it a really lovely (and difficult) portrayal of a realistic parent/child experience. And her mother the wasp with her constant stings was another difficult but well done metaphor and I appreciated how this played into Cassie’s own thoughts about being a mother herself.

This book was so personally relatable to me that I can’t help but love it. Immediately after college I moved to San Francisco during the dot.com boom. I am always a fan of reading books set in places that I am familiar with and because this time in my life was one of the worst for my own black hole I was blown away by how much I connected with this book and felt like Etter was writing pieces of my story, only in a way that I never would have been able to.

The device of using definitions and images was a unique way to structure the narrative. Some of the metaphors are fairly obvious/spelled out but I appreciated that the ending was not spelled out to the same extent and I will be thinking about it for a while. Honestly as I sit to write and edit this review I keep thinking of other things that struck me about this story. I loved this book and how it continues to grow on me. Definitely worth a preorder.

I throughly enjoyed this. Sarah Rose Etter writes a story of a woman working in tech, struggling to survive in San Francisco, and she has a black hole that’s been hovering above her since birth.

It’s anxiety inducing, the right amount of unhinged, and overall entertaining. I loved the structure of how this was written with each chapter defining a word and then using life examples from the main character to help define it before diving into the chapter. It was such a unique way to get to know Cassie.

All my lit fic girlies will enjoy this one

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for this ARC. Ripe was a claustrophobic and cerebral experience! Sarah’s prose is unlike any I’ve read of todays literary fiction. This story broke my heart and kept my full attention until the last page. There were so many amazing and heartbreaking quotes in this novel, too many to list.

Ripe was my first, but definitely not my last read by Sarah.

I absolutely loved the writing in this one. The themes in this book are all relevant to today’s work culture- depression, toxic work environments, and capitalism.
The main character, Cassie is attempting to cope in Silicon Valley, surrounded by homelessness and people caught up in the grind of the tech world. She’s fighting depression and trying to navigate a one sided relationship. I’m order to cope, she disassociates and starts to see herself as two different people.
The substance abuse and depression were triggering to me. I would recommend this book based on the writing style and subject matter.

This had all the Severance vibes and I loved it. A heartbreaking but clever take on capitalism, working life, and expectations. Keep working even though the world is basically ending! Lots of layers to this book that will make readers think and reflect, especially considering its relevance with Covid, wildfires, etc. in the world today.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book. I sometimes struggle with books that feel like they don't have a strong plot driving the action, but the writing was so unique and poetic that it kept my interest. The black hole element lent some magical realism, and helped highlight some of the absurdities the author discussed in our tech-driven, capitalist culture.

This book was ... different. But in a good kind of way. I really enjoyed the writing and found that this book kept me intrigued the whole way through!

thank you netgalley for the arc!!

5/5 stars

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what a haunting little book. i went into ripe fairly blind, not quite sure what to make of the promised premise; it is at once both what i expected and everything i did not. i want to warn anyone who’s thinking of reading this that it is extremely depressing and i’d make sure you’re in the right headspace to confront this beast.

they’ll tell you this is a dystopian work and if we go by what the universally acknowledged definition for dystopia is (pilfered from oxford:“an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic”) then i’d concur but with a caveat. dystopian fiction is speculative, it resonates with us and may even at times feel almost preternaturally prescient with its investigation of issues which plague us in our own modern day world - yet at the back of our heads there is that niggling little refrain of fiction. it’s fictive; it’s likely to slacken your jaw in horror but highly unlikely to happen in our lifetime if ever. if we take this into consideration, i’d argue against pigeonholing this book as a dystopian novel. in far too many senses i’d say we’ve been toeing the line of submerging earth into the urban hellscape which backdrops the events of ripe. the casual violence of city life, the wilful blinkers adorned by the rich towards a society racked with homelessness, a culture of endless debt and ‘hustling’ in a dead-end job where your pay barely covers your rent is not a dystopia - it is the here and now.

despite having a dreamlike feel to it, the only element of magic realism is that our protagonist, cassie, has spent her hapless life tailed by a ‘black hole’. although it’s really just a proxy for the desolation of her soul and a way out, so to speak. that is, a double-edged sword for either the promise of an end or the possibility of travelling through space-time into a new dimension, the evermore desired re-do. whenever cassie is troubled by say a callous act of hers she feels all but extorted into making or a conversation with her abusive mother, the black hole dilates correspondingly. it is in many ways more ‘cassie’ than cassie herself is by this point as it ostensibly seems to know when she is aggrieved or not, even as her own grasp of her emotions is dilatory, if not beyond her comprehension (being high more often than not). she is as much a witness to her own life as we are - in many ways even more so than us. she imagines herself as having essentially rent her ‘self’ in two as a way of coping with everything: a public necessarily disingenuous front she puts forth for the sake of survival and the private, deeply troubled truth of her. when she is at her happiest amongst art or speaking to her father, the sentences are rife with her emotion instead of the spectral prose we’re usually faced with wherein her own perspective feels as cut off from the story as she is disassociated from her own body.

the ending is horrendously perfect and hard-hitting. i’m not operating under the misapprehension that many fans will be gained for it but in my eyes it’s the only ending here.

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conclusion:
this beautifully composed elegy to the loneliness of hustling and playing the game, to the wounds wrought by cassie’s own hands to her soul all for the sake of then having the same game play her - will grab you by the throat; refusing to let go even long after you’ve turned the last page. this is a must-read!!

The description of this book was appealing to me. The premise of a woman's life in the crazy, cut-throat, and fast world of Silicon Valley where she is trying to reconcile the presence of absurd wealth next to homeless people bathing in the open really appealed to me. I was also intrigued by her battle with mental illness.
However, I was not too fond of the overall depressing tone of the book. Cassie and her friend Maria are both struggling with mental health issues and do not want to do anything about it. Instead, they are taking drugs to even be able to leave the house. It seems that the book only describes an extremely depressing cycle of people stuck in a system they hate. Making choices they are not happy with just to be able to stay there.
Cassie's character is interesting and has many layers to it. I empathized with her and her very unfortunate life situation but it frustrated me to read about her self-destructive acts throughout the book. Unfortunately, the novel doesn't have any likable characters.
Overall, I hoped that the novel would have an interesting story while also shining a light on important social issues but this book fails to deliver in terms of its storyline. I just kept waiting for a plot development that will build the story but was disappointed.

3.5 stars rounded up. Definitely content warnings for this one, the depression is real and bleak.

This is the story of a very depressed young woman whose depth of depression is manifested in a black hole that she sees following her around. She works for a tech company that is bleeding her dry, and her personal life is a mess. There are lots of themes here - hustle culture, income and housing inequality, sexism, loneliness, fake vs true self, and depression (as already noted).

I loved the workplace commentary. I have been enjoying books that satirize or critique office work, so this fits into that trend. It’s brutal and demanding, but she’s told she should be grateful to have the job, she just has to work harder to achieve some mythical top tier status. The way she puts her “fake self” on for work is unfortunately relatable, though my office work is nowhere near what her situation is.

I also thought the personal relationships (parents, friends, significant other) were well done and heartbreaking. Her dad’s reiteration that there’s nothing there for her back home, she’s better off where she is, hurts every time.

There’s a slow build, a slow descent. I appreciate a character spiraling, so that works well for me. I wouldn’t say she really behaves very differently until the very end, but you can feel the pressure of everything getting worse.

The reason this gets 3.5 stars from me is for a few reasons:
1. It tried to cover a LOT of themes in a short book. Adding the housing crisis and the pandemic felt like too much. Protest participation is like a blip in the book and it felt too shoehorned in, too on the nose. The workplace stuff was the most interesting for me.
2. The definitions included felt gimmicky and didn’t add anything to the story for me. The black hole as a visible thing also felt unnecessary tbh. I think it would have worked better in a movie version where you could easily take in the size and position of it scene to scene. Alternatively, if it played a more active role in the story, I’d have liked it more.
3. The language was too poetic and metaphor-filled for my taste at times. That kind of thing makes me zone out. I think it worked best at the end, but I don’t want to say anything that might spoil it!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Cassie’s life in San Francisco is expensive, depressing and hanging on by a thread. Eager to leave her hometown because her father keeps repeating that there is nothing left for her back home, she is drawn to the shimmering life in the city, working at a Silicon Valley company that will do anything to survive and outperform its competitors.Cassie becomes increasingly aware of how dispensable she is and how little respect she receives as she attempts to climb the career ladder.

Her constant companion is a black hole that is an obvious symbol of her depression, as it changes in size depending on her social setting. The hole looms larger and creates a hum when she’s stressed, so she’s relying on her cocaine habit and clandestine relationship with a chef to keep it small and contained.

This book is an amazing portrait of trying to survive late stage capitalism. There is never enough money or time, and everyone is holding on for dear life to their assets and principles. I really felt for Cassie even when I hated the decision she was making. Her experiences were creating a new person as her father suggested, but not in a way that she found healthy or sustainable and I completely understood that.

Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for permitting me to read this work prior to its release.

RIPE is a compelling novel following Cassie, who's one year into working at a competitive Silicon Valley start-up...except her dream job is beginning to feel more like a nightmare. Every day, she's faced with a toxic work environment and a jam-packed schedule, and the glaring class disparities Cassie is already noticing are only becoming more apparent. She feels depressed, anxious, and isolated, but she's never truly alone—a black hole has followed her around since childhood, changing in size and scope depending on what's going on in her life. Can Cassie navigate everyday work struggles, complicated personal relationships, and an ever-changing world, without getting pulled too far into the black hole's orbit?

I loved Etter's storytelling and writing style, and I thought the dictionary-style format at the beginning of each "chapter" was so well-done! I also appreciated how readers get snippets of Cassie's past—her tumultuous family relationships, the development of her depression from a young age, what her life was like before we first meet her—interspersed with what's happening to her in the present, and providing a better understanding of why she thinks and reacts in certain ways. RIPE covers a variety of important themes, but by the end of the story, I still felt like I wanted more from Cassie's character and her relationships with others, and I couldn't quite put my finger on what was missing. Still, I found it to be a really thought-provoking story, that will resonate with so many readers! Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

Thank you to Scribner & Netgalley for sharing this title~ I devoured this book in 48 hours and I think devoured is an apt word. Every sentence of this book oozed with juice for me, like biting into something and letting it drip down your arm. Headline: the writing is incredible, the social commentary on point, the character so well-developed. Read it.

Ripe from Sarah Rose Etter follows Cassie as she moves across the country for a job at the high-profile Voyager and as she navigates the insanely dystopian wealth disparities that exist between “The Believers”— those who buy into the Tech God’s dream of the future— and the real suffering of those displaced by them. Never alone, Cassie is followed by her own personal Black Hole which she threatens to fall into at any moment.

I am obsessed with this book. Point blank. Read it.

I am FOR SURE biased as I lived in San Francisco during the tech boom influx/rapid gentrification of 2013-2020; watched rents go from $500 for a room when I was a sophomore in college to $1200 for that same room by the time I graduated, watched the busses become flooded with vest wearing tech bros, watched another city, the city of the displaced, boom just as quickly. There were so many depictions of what it was like to really experience that wealth disparity and be caught somewhere in the middle of it where I had to read passages multiple times like “sheesh, you were so real for this.”
Read it. Did I already say that? Well I’ll say it again. Read. It.

This book was a wild ride throughout, and I was here for it. I did wish it was a bit longer because I felt like it ended on such a specific note and that there could've been more to enhance the feelings the protagonist expresses in the final section of the book. It's a dark book for sure, but it's very much satirizing the state of the world right now, trying to exist with personal and mental health problems and the divide between classes in a way that feels fairly productive and meaningful as a reader. I'll definitely recommend this one to my friends.

DNF at 20%, this book was too depressing and didn’t feel like it was going anywhere important. Maybe I’m wrong, but literary fiction is always hard fir me to get into anyway. The writing was awkward and choppy in my opinion and I had a hard time reading it.

Amazing!

Sarah Rose Etter's début, The Book of X, has been on my TBR for ages and the premise of this book caught my attention just as much as the absolute banger of a cover this book has.

All I'm going to say, in so many words, is that I loved this book. Like completely, utterly loved this book. This was such an engrossing look into depression and spiraling out, and being unsure of the future and whether the future holds a place for you (this is just my interpretation of the black hole and some of the thematic elements of this book). Etter has such a deft hand at characterization, to the point that I knew more about characters through one interaction or during one of the incredibly inventive, formally impressive word definitions that start the chapters than what some authors can do across 300+ pages.

It was funny. It was anxiety inducing. It was a complicated look at capitalism and the monsters it can make of us, and the ways that it can strip the self down to a fake version, something that is not you but wears you like a skin coat. More books should be this ambitious. This unapologetically magical and weird.

Thank you endlessly to Scribner and the author for granting me access to this wonderful ARC. May Etter have an excellent book launch! ❤️