A debut about Zoe and Jack, Harvard students who find themselves propelled into the intoxicating biotech startup world when they announce they’ve discovered the cure for aging. A different kind of love story where the thirst for achievement consumes and the stakes are forever.
The campus novel is reimagined as a start-up fairy tale ... After some initial throat clearing, Taylor’s fast-paced writing captures the pressure of start-up culture ... Zoe, by contrast, is written too tidily to ever transcend her predicament, resulting in a narrative that seems to unintentionally mirror the double standard between men and women in STEM ... Still, Taylor conveys with confidence and precision the intricacies of how women in science are perceived.
Commanding ... Insightful and zeitgeisty ... Begins as an intriguing slow burn ... But the novel really picks up speed when the business, named Manna (as in manna from heaven), takes off ... delivers an incisive exploration of a cutthroat contemporary culture that’s produced some spectacular scams. Taylor’s vividly observed, often beautifully wrought close third-person storytelling lets readers in on the emotional lives of her protagonists. A Harvard graduate herself, she peers hard at gender politics and class insecurity amid the hothouse culture of elite academia in this more cutting cousin to Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and The Startup Wife.
Sharp, insightful ... Taylor, a Harvard graduate, turns a razor-keen eye on the dynamics of a world-famous, high-pressure environment filled with young, ambitious students convinced they are (or should be) the best ... A blazing meditation on the pressure cooker of academia, the price of fame in the digital age, and how far is too far to go for a chance at corporeal—or scientific—immortality.
