Every day at 3:55 a.m., members of Team Movement clock in for their shift at big-box store Town Square in a small upstate New York town. Under the eyes of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day's truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before the store opens and customers arrive. Their lives follow a familiar if grueling routine, but their real problem is that Town Square doesn't schedule them for enough hours—most of them are barely getting by, even while working second or third jobs. When store manager Big Will announces he is leaving, the members of Movement spot an opportunity. If they play their cards right, one of them just might land a management job, with all the stability and possibility for advancement that that implies. The members of Team Movement—including a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging on to her "cool kid" status from high school, and a college football hopeful trying to find a new path—band together to set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot in motion.
Outstrips its predecessor technically, emotionally, and spiritually but is perhaps not quite as much fun ... Waldman immerses us in their world ... As her characters move through their routines, Waldman maintains a kind of steady presence, attentive but not intrusive ... Washes labor in a stately, almost Steinbeckian light, emphasizing its difficulty but also its dignity. That the prose doesn’t soar is the point ... Rotates through the minds of nearly a dozen employees, who sail into focus one by one as they react to the scheme and to the desires and resentments it stirs up. They come thickly alive, by turns ingenious, petty, motivated, yearning, empathic, perversely self-thwarting, and defiantly playful.
Waldman applies her sharp sense for relational drama and dark comedy to the retail work space ... Waldman is skilled at building momentum and tension through intricacies of plot. The book shines whenever the group is together, concocting plans to better their working conditions, resisting and influencing one another in search of a shared sense of hope.
Waldman’s strength is dramatic irony, and she is attracted to characters whose flaws are fluorescently obvious to the reader (and, often enough, the character’s friends and family) but remain invisible to the characters themselves ... Agility with characters’ psychology is key to the polyvocal Help Wanted ... Nimble ... Waldman is faithful to reality: The relentless grind in which these characters find themselves won’t change ... A tragedy of circumstance.
