Doree ShafrirRezensionen

Fast paced story about young start up employees in NYC who get involved in a scandal. It's easy reading, somewhat funny and a real page turner - a good choice for reading during a holiday with lots of distractions. The author is a woman and it's nice to have the female POV for most of the story. It wrapped up a little abruptly but otherwise an enjoyable ride. More of a 3.5 but not quite a 4.

I have such mixed feelings about this book. I wanted to like it, because it featured so many of the things I’m interested in and fascinated by: startups, New York, tech, social media, journalism, motherhood - you name it, this book had it. The novel held my attention throughout, and yet, when I turned the last page, I was profoundly disappointed.

There was so much that was right with this book: from the extremely insightful look at Sabrina’s struggle with her identity post-motherhood to the fascinating glimpse into startup culture, there was much to like here. The book was well written and entertaining. The author is clearly familiar with the tech world, and she uses her knowledge to good effect throughout.

But there was so much that was wrong with this book, too:
1) The shallowness of all the characters. All the men were jerks - seriously, ALL of them. Like, 100% of the male cast was somewhere on the uber-jerk end of the jerk-to-nice guy scale. The women weren’t much better, and few had any redeeming qualities at all. That made everyone difficult to like and gave me no one to root for.
2) The plot felt superficial. Most of it revolves around sexual harassment in the workplace, but what’s usually a sensitive and important topic was dealt with in a frivolous way and it just didn’t feel strong enough to carry a nearly 300-page book.
3) The ending is atrocious. It’s ambiguous and doesn’t tie anything up. I thought the book had been misprinted and the last chapter was left off, because I literally turned the page to read the next chapter only to discover there was nothing there. Ambiguous endings are one of my major pet peeves, and this novel right here perfectly illustrates the reason why. So frustrating!

As soon as I heard about this book I knee I must read it, because despite being a decade younger than Doree I could relate to the subject matter. I thought it started out pretty slowly though, going over her dating life in New York and some work stuff that didn't really go anywhere, but I definitely enjoyed the later part of the book more. Probably because it deals heavily with infertility and writing, and since I am currently pregnant and due any day now, those parts resonated with me. So I liked it, but I feel like it could've delved a bit deeper into what it means to be a late bloomer and stuff, instead of just describing it.

While I'd love to say I liked this book, it's difficult due to shallow characters, a soap opera type story and droll concept. I struggled through it and found it predictable in all ways, with characters that I've seen countless times, mostly in bad soap operas. Oh well...

Really did not enjoy this at all. Overly descriptive to the point of distracting, not much of a plot, the characters were underdeveloped, and the ending just hangs there. I guess it's to let us readers imagine what would happen next. I imagine that the three women characters went off somewhere to talk to Lena Dunham about things, since I think they have as much understanding about what feminism does as she has.

Let's begin. "Startup" I think was supposed to be a tongue and cheek look at the startup and tech industry in New York. Told in the third person we follow 3 characters.

Mack McAllister (rising star in the startup industry) Sabrina (back in the workforce working for one of Mack's managers) Katya (a reporter) who works for Sabrina's husband, Dan. There is also the character of Isabel who I guess you could say is the catalyst for a lot of things that happen in this book, but I don't consider her or Dan main characters really. They are just there for the majority of the book.

I didn't like any of the characters. The men were awful, but I think I was supposed to root for the three women (Sabrina, Katya, and Isabel) at the end of the book and I didn't. The three of them were just as terrible as the men in this book and I hated that we had Katya being a particular hypocrite about what the character of Mack got up to considering what was going on with her too.

Honestly most of the things that were discussed went over my head a fair bit. I am 37 so I am on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. I loathe Snapchat and will never get an account. Why does anyone think I need to see a picture of you with a dog nose? Ahem.

I didn't like the writing in this at all. It took til about the 40 percent mark to even get the story up to interesting status for me. The first couple of chapters were painfully over written and it was hard to even read some of the sentences.

There was one person at MorningRave who did not post any selfies to Instagram. She was there to dance, and only to dance. Nor did she say hello to Mack. She knew who he was, but he was not yet aware of her existence. Katya Pasternack was at the party with her boyfriend, Victor, who himself was a founder of a small company called StrollUp.

Katya weighed ninety-nine pounds and had never gone to the gym a day in her life, but she danced at this party as though it were her job.

Mack McAllister exited his East Village apartment building wearing a royal-blue gingham-checked button-down shirt tucked into jeans and a navy blazer. He carried a soft brown briefcase with two buckles, given to Mack by his father when he graduated from the University of Texas and on which his initials--WSM, William Sumner McAllister--were embossed in gold capital letters.

The ending fell flat for me. I guess I should have been all girl power. Instead I rolled my eyes.

Oh, here's a fast, engaging read set in the tech scene in New York. It features Millenials, the old and the young among them. And it does a great job examining and critiquing these things through that lens.
But what really struck me is how it really felt like it was about women in the workforce. The challenges of being a young woman at work. The challenges of being middle-aged in a position with mostly young employees. The challenges of the tech bro gods and working with and for them-as a woman-and how truly awful it really can be.

Shafrir's examination of marriage with children & working parents also felt spot on. She handled deftly the idea that modern men really shoulder as much as we (they?) think they do when it comes to divvying up domestic life.

Generally, this book just resonated in a way that surprised me. It's like she listened in on my chats with friends over the past 15 years of my life and spun it into a story about 3 women.

I would've read 400 more pages on this subject. Truly.

So, I started this book thinking it was one thing...and I'm not sure I even remember what/why...but it was not that. HOWEVER - I was very pleasantly surprised about the pace, story, and characters.

I am a regular listener of Doree and Matt's podcast (Matt and Doree's Eggcellent Adventure) and I should have known, just from listening to Doree that I would enjoy her writing voice. I enjoy her intelligent humor on the podcast, the book was just as enjoyable. The characters were well developed and personable, so I cared about what happened to them. The story was interesting and engaging, so not only did I enjoy it, but I am eager for more. Doree is a talented writer and I look forward to reading more of her work.

I need to qualify this review. I am a 60 year old software engineer that worked on Silicon Valley for 25 years and as a consultant out of the valley for 10 years. When I left, Yahoo was up and coming, Amazon was a bookstore, and Google was a bunch of nerds chasing Netscape.

Having said that, I found this book very superficial. The characters had no real depth. And there was very little intrigue to the plot. To be fair, the real life people the author is portraying also have little depth (I worked with several in may last years in the valley). But I thought the plot could have been much more interesting, especially considering the subject matter. And the ending really left me flat.

Although it portraits the startup environment very nice, I felt like the first half of the book was tremendously slow. The real story unfolded in the last third of the book, but the story was left unfinished at the end. The author could have given a better closure to it.

Mack McAllister is a tech startup genius, poised to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. He was sleeping with one of his employees, Isabel, but lately she's been ignoring his sexts. Isabel invites her employee, Sabrina, to a dinner party hosted by her new boyfriend. Sabrina agrees to go, even though it doesn't really sound like her thing. (At 10 years older than everyone else in the company, and the only one with kids at home, she has struggled to fit in.) At the party Sabrina meets Katya, a tech news blog reporter and coworker of Sabrina's husband Dan. The two of them accidentally see explicit photos that a drunk Mack sends to Isabel, and all of their worlds blow up from there.

So nice to read a story about tech and startups that has real women in it! It's also very realistic about technology - there might be some things about modern technology that are weird or even suck pretty bad but that doesn't mean we should all go back to banging two rocks together. The men in this story are obsessed with their Venture Capitalist funding and forget that the people around them (especially the women) are real people, to their own detriment! This was a really fun book to read and an almost loving parody of startup culture, in contrast to the dour dystopia of something like Dave Eggar's The Circle.½

This book was an interesting look at start up tech companies. I liked how it followed different people in different companies and how their lives are entwined. New York was a good setting for the book. I just did not really relate to any of the characters.

The description of this book is terrible. The story is actually far more interesting and engaging than the way it was described.

I looked at this book several times to consider if I wanted to read it or not and kept on deciding against it. I might not have read it had Book of the Month Club not selected it for April 2017's selection. But I'm glad I did read it. Definitely a different story than I'm used to.

The story is told from the view point of three characters. The writing is great in that each character's chapter had a sense of how that character is. However, I continually found myself mortified at not only the language, both profane and improperly used, but (like) also the behavior of (like) the characters. Is this really how (like) other twenty-somethings act?? As another twenty-something I found some of it be teeth-grindingly annoying. HOWEVER, I believe this is a telling sign that the author's writing actually transcended "great". She made me believe her words and her characters. I abhorred the antagonist's chapters and applauded the protagonist's chapters. Well done.

My only true qualm with this book was the ending. Or really the lack of an ending. The ending felt rushed and thoughtless. There's all these loose ends that don't get tied up or explained and I can't help wondering if there will be a second book to carry on the narratives that weren't finished out. Especially with the ending of Sabrina's character; what does she know that she needs to do????

An engaging page-turner. Very on-topic, with similarities to Silicon Valley (tv show) and Disrupted (memoir).

Should a book about douche-y Millennials be douche-y itself? This is the dilemma with Startup. Every male character is a horrendous dudebro and each woman is sad and vulnerable. But it's wickedly funny in many spots and the author has perfect aim when her arrows fly against social media and its denizens. How is this all different than the earlier Dotcom disaster? "If it wasn't on your phone, it might as well not exist." And in this world, "creativity" is defined as how the professionals and users alike change some words around to get more likes than the original tweet/snap/instagram.

The plot centers around a deliberate dickpic and its consequences. And also on the canyon between those in their 20s and the ancient 30 somethings: "Couldn't thirty nine year olds just be old and tired and not talk about it constantly?" And also on the perpetual War of the Gender Roles:

She: "You have this assumption that whatever it is you're doing is more interesting than whatever it is that I'm doing."
He: "I think that objectively, yes, my day is more interesting than yours. I'm not saying its more important, but it is more interesting."
She: "Oh, really, fuck you."

and this:

She: "What's wrong with trying to be happy? I wouldn't mind trying to be happy, to be perfectly honest."
He: "It's not that being happy is bad. It's the fetishization of happiness and productivity above all that I take issue with."
She: "Okay. But it's not like you don't want the people who work for you to be productive too."
He: "That's not the point."
She thought: "It's kind of the point". But suddenly she was so, so tired.

So...I kind of loved this book.

This was not a typical genre or even generation for me, but I really enjoyed this satirical portrait of millennials negotiating the startup culture of today's tech world. Shafrir gives a great snapshot (no pun intended) of what is becoming our social media driven society.

Her biting wit resulted in me smiling a lot as I read....especially at some of the made up (or maybe not so fictional) apps being created. What struck me is that despite the changing culture of the workplace as technology becomes a driving force, some things like the role of women and workplace relationships haven't changed all that much.

The ending is somewhat abrupt and enigmatic....but perhaps it is reflective of the environment about which Shafrir writes. Enjoy this book for the satire it is and marvel at what we are becoming in our tech savvy world.

I liked this book a lot. There were a lot of chuckles. There were women getting even (YAY!!). And, it was a great read. I whipped right through it very pleasantly.

The ending, however, just kind of dropped off. Leading me to hope (fingers crossed) that there will be a sequel. I would definitely read it. I NEED to know what happens to Mack and is there any retaliation for Sabrina's husband? What a snake!

Now I know my review has got you interested in this read. Ha! Seriously, it is an entertaining, enjoyable and hilarious read.

Thanks to Little, Brown and Company for approving my request and to Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest review.

Doree Shafrir's breakout novel is witty, satirical, and just a little too real and uncomfortable in places. This amazingly funny look at startup culture in New York illustrates the stereotypical conceptions of twenty-somethings making their millions while turning a spotlight on the very real issues of women (of all ages and sentiments) navigating a male dominated industry.

Shafrir tackles issues like inter-office dating, sexual harassment, sexual coercion, and being a woman in her thirties (gasp!) in the millenials' world. It is a fun, face paced story that perfectly balances satire and real world issues.

I highly recommend it.