dani ༊'s Reviews > Ripe

thank you netgalley for the arc !

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ 5/5 stars

➸ perfect for lovers of otessa moshfegh, mona awad and sayaka murata, ripe will cast its spell on you in a darkly enchanting story as we follow a spiralling woman scrambling for purchase in the stifling landscape of silicon valley. we bear witness to her brutal pain as she continually abuses substances to numb herself, is forced to make obeisances to her bullying superiors at work, wears her bleeding heart on her sleeve in an unrequited affair with an unavailable chef and relentlessly sacrifices her soul to simply make a living. invoking nightmarish sequences and throwing the cruelty of city life into relief, etter crafts an unforgettable cautionary tale against hustle culture and establishes this book as a formidable success of the sad girl fic sub-genre.

➸ what a haunting little book. i went into ripe fairly blind, not quite sure what to make of the promised premise; it is at once both what i expected and everything i did not. i want to warn anyone who’s thinking of reading this that it is extremely depressing and i’d make sure you’re in the right headspace to confront this beast.

➸ they’ll tell you this is a dystopian work and if we go by what the universally acknowledged definition for dystopia is (pilfered from oxford:“an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic”) then i’d concur but with a caveat. dystopian fiction is speculative, it resonates with us and may even at times feel almost preternaturally prescient with its investigation of issues which plague us in our own modern day world - yet at the back of our heads there is that niggling little refrain of this is fiction. as such, it’s likely to slacken your jaw in horror but highly unlikely to take place in our lifetime if ever. if we take this into consideration, i’d argue against pigeonholing this book as a dystopian novel. in far too many senses i’d say we’ve been toeing the line of submerging earth into the urban hellscape which backdrops the events of ripe. the casual violence of city life, the wilful blinkers adorned by the rich towards a society racked with homelessness, a culture of endless debt and ‘hustling’ in a dead-end job where your pay barely covers your rent is not a dystopia - it is the here and now.

➸ despite having a dreamlike feel to it, the only element of magic realism is that our protagonist, cassie, has spent her hapless life tailed by a ‘black hole’. this singular instance of ‘magic’ serves as a bleak proxy for the desolation of her soul and a way out, so to speak. that is, a double-edged sword for either the promise of an end or the possibility of travelling through space-time into a new dimension, the evermore desired re-do. whenever cassie is troubled by, say, a callous act of hers she feels all but extorted into making or a conversation with her abusive mother, the black hole dilates correspondingly. it is in many ways more ‘cassie’ than cassie herself is by this point as it ostensibly seems to know when she is aggrieved or not, even as her own grasp of her emotions is dilatory, if not presently beyond her understanding (being high more often than not). she is as much a witness to her own life as we are - in many ways even more so than us. she imagines herself as having essentially rent her ‘self’ in two as a way of coping with everything: a public necessarily disingenuous front she puts forth for the sake of survival and the private, deeply troubled truth of her. when she is at her happiest amongst art or speaking to her father, the sentences are rife with her emotion instead of the spectral prose we’re usually faced with wherein her own perspective feels as cut off from the story as she is disassociated from her own body.

➸ the ending is horrendously perfect and hard-hitting. i’m not operating under the misapprehension that many fans will be gained for it but in my eyes it’s the only ending here.

➸ conclusion :
this beautifully composed elegy on the loneliness of hustling and playing the game and the wounds wrought by cassie’s own hands to her soul all for the sake of then having the same game play her - will grab you by the throat, refusing to let go even long after you’ve turned the last page. this is a must-read!!