Audiobook Review – Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke, Narrated by Various (3/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Contemporary Fiction/Humor
Length: 3 hours and 27 minutes
Publisher: Random House Audio
Release Date: August 31, 2021
ASIN: B08TQGDFTQ
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone book
Source: Borrowed Audiobook from Library
Rating: 3/5 stars
“Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm, has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels – at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from-home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from…wherever he says he is.
Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his coworker Pradeep to help him escape and to find out what happened to his body. But the longer Gerald stays in the void, the more alluring and absurd his reality becomes.
Meanwhile, Gerald’s colleagues have PR catastrophes of their own to handle in the real world. Their biggest client, a high-end dog food company, is in the midst of recalling a bad batch of food that’s allegedly poisoning Pomeranians nationwide. And their CEO suspects someone is sabotaging his office furniture. And if Gerald gets to work from home all the time, why can’t everyone? Is true love possible between two people, when one is just a line of text in an app? And what in the hell does the :dusty-stick: emoji mean?”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I borrowed this on audiobook from my library.
Thoughts: This was fairly entertaining even if it didn’t make much sense. I listened to this on audiobook and I would not recommend doing that. In the audiobook they say the emoticons out loud and this ends up being incredibly repetitious and annoying. I did like that they used a full cast for this audiobook though, that made it easier to listen to.
Gerald is working on a spreadsheet to help him figure out what winter coat to buy when he is sucked into the Slack channel. Now he has to figure out how to get his co-workers to help him get his consciousness back into his body and out of the Slack channel. At first the Slackbot seems like it is useless in helping, but then it seems to change and become more nefarious.
This is kind of a goofy collection of Slack conversations around both Gerald’s improbable situation, and general office chatter. It shows how little people work at times and shows how important our digital presence has become.
I had a couple of issues with this. One was the repetition of the emoticons and how awful that was to listen to on audiobook. The second was that nothing is ever explained very well. We don’t know why Gerald ended up stuck in Slack and we never really get to understand the wolves (at least I didn’t). It was a fine quick read aside from those issues. It was kind of like Office Space but with a bit of additional weirdness thrown in.
My Summary (3/5): Overall this was fine. It was a fun and quick listen that had some weirdness and some humor in it. There is a lot of typical office behavior in here that is entertaining if you’ve ever worked in an office. This really did not work well as an audiobook (although I did appreciate the full cast). The story also didn’t worry about explaining why these inexplicable things were happening. Worth a quick read if you can get it from your library.
