You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
"In retrospect, my mother and the black hole made the same sound, that low, relentless buzz. Maybe I have always had two black holes trailing me."
✒︎4 stars
Ripe follows a millennial-aged woman living in Silicon Valley and working for a tech-startup. Long story short, her job sucks and the world is falling apart around her. For her whole life, Cassie has been followed by a "black hole." As the book progresses and she's told to do some increasingly worse things for her job, the hole expands and becomes hard to manage. The plot of this book is very slow and more introspective. Despite this, I still found myself tensing as the book went on. The things that happened to Cassie made me truly disturbed on a personal level. The writing wasn't shocking in a gore sense, but stressful for me- someone who struggles a lot with mental health.
Ripe portrays mental illness in a very on-the-nose way. It's obvious that Cassie's "black hole" is a metaphor for her loneliness, depression, anxiety, etc. I can understand why some readers may feel like this ruins the book for them, but for me personally, I really connected with how Cassie's mental illness developed throughout the book. I also am an astronomy nerd and love black holes, so what better way to portray mental illness? By the end of the book, I felt almost sick. The parallels with the pomegranates and the depictions of homelessness and late-stage capitalism really made me feel hopeless, especially in the current climate. I would highly recommend you don't read this book if you are not feeling good mentally because of the reasons listed above. Despite how gross I felt by the end, I really loved the depiction of Cassie's mental health- or lack thereof- and I appreciate what Etter did portraying the griminess of Silicon Valley and the rich tech-startups that grow there.
While I enjoyed the writing and slower plot, I felt as though Etter put too many plot lines in the book that were left unresolved. Cassie's relationship with her parents, for an example, or her relationship with her "friends." A lot of random disturbing stuff happened to Cassie that was never really explained or developed. I think that this book definitely could have been a bit longer, and I would have ate it up. Although I did like the ending, I didn't like everything that was left unresolved- or maybe that was the point, seeing the one way you could interpret the ending.
All in all, I appreciated what Etter did with this book but I think that she bit off a bit more pomegranate seeds than she could chew.
Check me out on other platforms...
✒︎TikTok
✒︎Twitter
✒︎Instagram
✒︎YouTube
✒︎Patreon