William Sanderson is very rich, but you can always be richer. He's up for a huge promotion at investment giant Bedrock Capital, but there's one crucial hurdle he must clear first—assuming he can keep the HR department at bay. He's also looking for any string to pull to get his maddeningly indifferent daughter Ginny into Yale. Ellie, his wife, is a newcomer to New York who only wants to fit in, while Daughter #2, the shy Zoey, is happy just to make a new friend, even in the form of the unusual new girl who calls herself a goblin. Things turn upside down when the girls' exclusive school admits its first trans student, only to have her mysteriously disappear. As a frenzied search begins, the entire city frets about her fate. Somehow caught in the crosshairs are the Sandersons, a family desperately trying to navigate all the new cultural rules—and failing miserably.
Unrelatable, unmoving characters who exist in a world detached from reality ... ... The bigger problem here is the stilted writing. Dialogue is treated as an opportunity to dump information on readers who are presumed too stupid to understand big words. A better editor might have trimmed the worst of the awkward conversations ... The first time I’ve wondered if part of a novel was written by an LLM. There’s no sense of humanity here. ... So many of the scenes are meetings that could have been an email ... [The book] isn’t funny or witty or entertaining or heartfelt. It reads like filler in an attempt to imitate the idea of people ... The novel finally picks up about a third of the way through ... There are absolutely moments in this middle portion of the book that build page-turning tension, and there’s quite a good unraveling of the plot ... The trouble with all this is that the plot and page-turning is derailed by the perpetual victim syndrome rotting each of these characters to the core ... Johnston has failed to create characters to empathize with, and that’s an essential component of satire.
Like-minded readers may enjoy [Johnston's] snarky lambasting of 'woke' culture, but those seeking fully realized characters, or a nuanced critique of contemporary liberalism, may do better elsewhere.
Clever ... Johnston holds no cows sacred in this entertaining take on the roles privilege and virtue signaling play in the pursuit of ambition. Admirers of The Bonfire of the Vanities ought to take a look.
