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** spoiler alert ** It wasn’t that this book was bad, so much as that it didn’t know what it wanted to be. Structurally and emotionally, it’s a romance. It’s got the typical scatty heroine who hasn’t got her life together and follows her as she simultaneously finds love and a better job, because the two are intermingled goals in nine out of ten modern romance novels. Which is fine � romances are IRL fantasies, and a lot of modern women, myself included, fantasise about finding a male cheerleader who’ll support us as we make a necessary but difficult life change. I have absolutely no fault to find with this plot programme.

However, the book is marketed and positioned in a growing genre of ‘sad-girl millennial� books, where a lot of the focus is one how us millennials can’t buy houses or afford nice lives because capitalism fucked us over. Which is also not a bad subject matter to mine, although it wouldn’t be one I’d rush to read repeatedly. However, the through-line seems to be that work is universally terrible and people who attempt to make the experience more tolerable are chumps and suck-ups.

Now, I don’t have experience working in the corporate sector, but work in the public sector brings its own unique fatigues and inertia of pointlessness. And at the end of the day, if you don’t have generational wealth, and if you aren’t one of the lucky other one percent who has a job doing something they genuinely love, then yes: work is a huge part of your day and your life, and the people you work with can impact your wellbeing more than your family and partner. My takeaway from that is not to repine and rend my clothes but to accept that getting along with my colleagues is a big priority, even if that means eating my words and taking Ls at times.

The problem in the book lies mostly in Sue’s inability to make a convincing person out of Jolene. Jolene experienced the traumatic death of a friend in school, but the story goes out of its way to clear her of any wrong-doing or real responsibility for this; her trauma really resides in the bullying after the event. It skips over what she did in college in order to land her corporate job, and makes her an alcoholic. Which � fine. It’s a dark book, those are important too. But she’s also as quippy as Buffy Summers when the hot HR guy happens along, even though she’s unable to talk like a human to her colleagues of eight years. She doesn’t understand the concept of socialising at work or out of it, yet is able to break down walls with Rhonda and Armin when she gets accidental access to their work emails. Not their personal ones � their work emails.

The narrative asks for a lot of latitude from the reader, especially when the fact of Jolene’s meddling is revealed. This isn’t just career-ending, it’s relationship-ending, yet everyone is fine with it to the point that her relationship with not just Cliff but Rhonda, Miley, and her parents improves. I’m not saying hitting rock bottom isn’t a turning point for a lot of addicts, just that it didn’t land in this story, because the writing simply wasn’t there. The story of the conniving weirdo who takes advantage of a data breach and the white-knight HR guy who unaccountably finds her extensive problems appealing is a way darker one than Sue lets it become, and it jostles uncomfortably with the romcom skeleton on which it's built. Overall � incoherent and unconvincing.