Let’s start with what I did like.

I appreciated the themes of this book that centered around 1) the soul-sucking meat grinder that is capitalism and its lie that corporate-ladder-climbing is anything other than killing yourself in service of your employer, 2) the conflation of career with identity and worth, and 3) the ethics of gun ownership.

Despite the name of the book and what the synopsis might suggest, I think the main conflict in this story isn’t necessarily between Aretha and her survivalist roommates, or even the tension between her objection to gun ownership and the thrill she experiences selling illegal guns. I think the main conflict (and the more compelling conflict) is the tension between Aretha’s desire to be good at her job and Aretha’s hatred for her job. I think that’s something a lot of people can relate to on a deeply intimate level.

I thought the characters were unique, even if they weren’t likable (they weren’t meant to be, so that’s not a criticism). I also think Cauley has a way of describing things that’s often very tangible and artfully done. There’s a moment that stands out to me when she’s talking about the exterior of a brownstone building, and she describes the floor-to-ceiling windows as looking like eyelids propped open with toothpicks.

What made me dislike this book as much as I did was the writing style. This is an entirely personal preference, so others will likely disagree, but I found it weighed down by its long stretches of internal monologue, which were very tangential and read like an easily-distracted stream-of-consciousness. They were full of these run-on sentences with confusing structures making up paragraphs which started in one place, ended someplace totally different, and left me wondering how we got there. I spent a lot of this book re-reading whole pages for that reason.

Here’s an example. This is ONE sentence:

“She packed while getting hit with the memories of the apartment she’d agreed to ditch: the glory of finding a decent place to cushion the sting of having to move out of the apartment she shared with her three caterer roommates who kept their kitchen so full of free white wine and congealed hours d’oeuvres that she had to keep her food in her bedroom but were always up for going out on a Thursday, or a Tuesday night, or a Sunday afternoon after-party to the Sunday morning after-party to the Saturday night start of the whole thing; celebrating the raise she’d gotten at work with Nia, an ill-advised pre-party bottle of rum and the taxi driver who reversed backwards down a narrow street at forty miles an hour to avoid a stopped ambulance; getting ready to go out to a party in her apartment’s tiny, badly lit bathroom and accidentally gluing a set of false eyelashes just far enough away from her real ones that she looked like she’d started knitting a blanket to cover her face.” (Pg. 102-103)

But it wasn’t just the run-on sentences that were confusing either. For example, “Six months before Aretha entered their lives was the sixth month after James showed up” (pg. 56). That sounds like the beginning of an algebraic word problem. Why not just phrase it: “Aretha entered their lives a year after James showed up”?

Those are just a couple examples pulled out of context, but that’s basically the style in which the entire book is written. Besides a few moments when the humor broke through and had me genuinely laughing out loud, I couldn’t make myself enjoy reading it.