I’m not sure I would have enjoyed Startup<\/i> as much as I did if I didn’t a) live in NYC and b) know people who work in tech, but I found it to be a very fun, funny, and quick read, even though none of the characters are particularly sympathetic. There’s Mack McAllister, the 28-year-old founder of a mindfulness app called TakeOff, who’s stressed about getting more funding for his company, which has been burning through cash, and who’s also belatedly realizing he’s totally falling for Isabel Taylor, the woman he’s been casually hooking up with for a while (who’s one of his employees, and who, it turns out, doesn’t feel the same way about him). There’s Sabrina Choe Blum, a 36-year-old MFA-program graduate who was a stay-at-home-mom for a few years but now is back in the workforce as an “Engagement Ninja” at TakeOff, reporting to Isabel (who’s a decade younger than she is). There’s Dan Blum, Sabrina’s husband, who’s 39 and an editor at TechScene, a website that covers tech news and is based in the same office building as TakeOff. And there’s Katya Pasternack, a 24-year-old reporter at TechScene who works for Dan and is feeling pressured to break a big story, particularly after the heads of TechScene implement a new ranking system for their writers that’s based on the impact of their pieces rather than just on traffic.<\/p>\n
Spoiler alert: the story Katya ends up wanting to break is about Mack and Isabel and the question of whether he’s been sexually harassing her: he sends her a series of dick pics, which Katya happens to see on Isabel’s phone at a party, and that’s really just the beginning of his bad behavior. There are some really cringe-inducing scenes about misogyny in startup office culture, and, honestly, culture at large: that thing where women are painted as “unstable”; that thing where, as Katya puts it, far too many guys seem to subscribe to the “call women crazy whenever they do something that makes you uncomfortable” school of thought (253). <\/p>\n
But while I found the sexual harassment plot thread interesting and timely and thought-provoking, and while I appreciated the book’s feminism, I was really here for this book as a portrait of New York now, the new “Promised Land of Duane Reades and Chase ATMs on every corner, luxury doorman buildings, Pilates studios and spin classes, eighteen-dollar rosemary-infused cocktails and seven-dollar cups of single-origin coffee” (4), the New York of sober morning raves (yes, that is a real thing; no, I’ve never been to one, though I was tempted when there was one at the climbing gym I go to) and start-up incubators and offices with fancy coffee and twenty-somethings who seem totally fine with the degree to which their lives revolve around their work\/their co-workers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m not sure I would have enjoyed Startup as much as I did if I didn’t a) live in NYC and b) know people who work in tech, but I found it to be a very fun, funny, and quick read, even though none of the characters are particularly sympathetic. There’s Mack McAllister, the 28-year-old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}