Thank you to Berkley for this arc! All thoughts are my own.

Valley Verified centers around fashion loving Zoe Zeng as she transitions from a thankless fashion editorial job to a high level position at a fashion based app startup in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, Zoe feels in over her head as she deals with this cutthroat, male-dominated environment that leaves her feeling useless and inexperienced and the overarching theme is her learning how to #girlboss in this coming of age story.

I thought this was fine up until maybe 50% but then found myself skimming for most of the remainder. I recognize that I maybe don’t care about tech based stories as this is the third one I’ve tried in the more recent months and I’ve found that I have a really hard time connecting with the characters and the setting of Silicon Valley.

More so, I started to get really annoyed with Zoe by the midway mark of this book. I feel like she really regressed in her thinking and was very naive about the people she was working with. It was pretty obvious what was going on and I got very annoyed with her hatred of Lillian because like, girl, you’re the only two women in the office. Maybe have a bit of perspective of how she’s had to hold herself in this workspace before you arrived? Just some of Zoe’s thinking in this book felt like she was a teenager and I think she wouldn’t have found herself in some of the positions she was in if she had just a little bit of forethought.

The romance was very lackluster as well and felt like much of that storyline was in the background. I didn’t feel a lot of chemistry between the two. I did enjoy some of these side characters, especially Bernadette. I would enjoy a book about Ms. Bernie and her story.

Overall, this was fine but it was honestly a little forgettable. I read this last week and I’m already forgetting some names and most of the scenes. I still want to read Kyla’s debut because I have it and I’ve heard fun things about that one, but this book missed the mark for me.