Rock, the glum yet over-stimulated protagonist and narrator of Charlie Jane Anders novella “Rock Manning Goes for Broke”, summarizes his life from age 4 through the end of high school in one chapter. Starting with his stunt double father throwing him off a roof to teach his boy the tricks of the trade, Rock grows up with a penchant for playing self-inflicted injuries for laughs. Even bullies have trouble bullying him, because they can’t do anything to him worse than what he’s willing to do for himself. As a teenager, the surreal slapstick comedies he makes with his best friend Sally Hamster make him an internet-streaming sensation. Meanwhile, poking out from the margins of his stream-of-consciousness biography is a portrait of an America slowly sliding into dystopia. A war overseas leads to the re-instatement of the draft while economic turmoil leads to rioting. Worst of all, a group of fascist street thugs called the Red Bandanas rise to prominence, and they want to exploit Rock’s fame to make propaganda films for their cause. Again, this all goes down just in the first chapter.
Anders’s talent for delivering absurdist humor with one hand and a knife to the gut with the other is in overdrive here. The pace and tone are set by the perpetual anxiousness of the story’s hero, and while that’s part of what makes “Rock Manning” so exhilarating, it’s also part of the problem. Anders never lets us come up for air, and the experience of reading it ends up being a lot like spending too much time around a hyperactive, attention-seeking teenager—exhausting, frustrating, leaving you glancing nervously at the clock and trying to conjure an excuse to slip away while he barrels onward, demanding the spotlight. There is plenty to reward readers who stick it through to the end, though, and Anders completists will not want to miss it.

Charlie Jane Anders' Rock Manning Goes for Broke is a laugh out loud funny dystopian tale that is not that different from the one we currently live in. Rock and Sally make viral videos, try to survive high school and college, all while economies collapse, fascism rises, and wars rage on.

I will definitely read Anders' other work. I enjoyed the stuntman and his friend making slapstick internet films inspired by Buster Keaton. It's a well written story and I read it in one sitting. Unputdownable is an understatement.

A short novella where a boy who loves slapstick comedy uses it to navigate his world, which is slowly falling to fascism, and what happens when the government wants to fund his work. Accurately captures of what it feels like to be in a nation that’s slowly but surely and irrevocably changing. There’s a few things that feel a bit hand wavy towards the end, but in a way that I’m willing to let go. I finished this over about an hour or so on the bus ride home here. The version I had had some formatting wonkiness, but I’m pretty sure that will be fixed on the released eBook edition.

This is a frenetic, mind-meltingly weird book, and Charlie Jane Anders pulls it off so well. She takes this incredibly dark imagined American future of economic collapse, fascism, and war, and sets it in the background of a manic stuntman's life story as he makes crazy YouTube videos tries to figure out what to do with his life. The comedy and strange optimism of Rock's life makes this a fun read, even as the details of Rock's world are shocking.

"Rock Manning Goes for Broke" is a rare example of the modern-day fable done right, all heart and nuanced back-and-forth between modern tastes; this is, after all, a dystopia with a sharp surrealist turn, layered with complex relationships between sympathetic, accessible characters. In the compressed span of 128 pages, this novella holds no punches, takes every risk, and spools out every thread of feeling its readers thought they'd lost in those not-nearly-so-carefree-as-everyone-says years when youth reaches into adulthood and gets its wrist slapped. There is a sweetness here that's not remotely cloying, side-by-side with harsh realities and a sense of impending doom—the kind of doom which can only be held off by memes and viral videos for so long, and which steals all the air from the room, leeches the blood from the bodies of friends and not-quite-friends, and slams the lid down on the human urge to make art in the face of apocalypse.

This isn't slapstick fun, no matter what other reviews say. This is an earnest grappling with the intractable forces which govern our lives, skinned over with whimsical, surrealist dark comedy. Anders asks: What to do in the face of the cruel inevitabilities of war and chaos? Make art. Make the best, wildest, weirdest art you can. It may not tame the world's untamableness, but it may just transform the artist—and reader.

This book is a blending of three short stories into a cohesive novella. It started off see for me but by the end of the first story I was hooked. The plot followed an internet sensation and his partners in filmmaking and oppressive politics and the start of a dystopia. The book both funny and sad. Highly recommend!

A wild, kinetic, frenetic, roller coaster ride. Full of heartache and pain, but also a weird sense of humor. I loved it.

I loved Charlie Jane Anders previous book, All the Birds in the Sky, which was wacky but still based enough in reality that I had no problems trying to follow it. This book, however, made me feel extremely lost. It jumps around so much that I didn't get any feeling of a linear story. I feel like if you are interested in the really wacky and non-linear, you would like this, but it wasn't for me.

The opening chapters of Rock Manning Goes for Broke seemed awfully familiar and it wasn't until a bit later that I realized Anders was expanding her stories from the John Joseph Adams / Hugh Howey apocalyptic anthologies The End is Nigh / Now / Has Come. That is only to say that parts of this short novel may well feel familiar to other readers as well.

Rock Manning Goes for Broke is a gonzo over the top novel of guerilla film making that mixes up with some deadly serious militia and propaganda. Anders is one heck of a storyteller and as different as this is from All the Birds in the Sky, it's just about as good. It's short but packs a real punch.

Frenetic, kind of random, and yet still very very Charlie Jane Anders. Less heart than All the Birds in the Sky though. I am glad this was a novella, because I don’t know if I would have had the patience for a novel-length story of Rock. But as a bite-sized experience, it was wacky and entertaining and maybe a little too scary given our current political climate.

This book needs one of the over-the-top "IN A WORLD..." trailers.

To say this was a wild ride from start to finish doesn't quite do this novella justice. It's absurd and hilarious, making me literally laugh out loud in what has to be my highest LOL-to-page ratio ever. (More than just a little "pah-huh!" exhalation each time, but actual "HA!"s or chuckles and the like.)

But even while the world is falling down around second-generation stunt-man Rock Manning and his slapstick viral video-making friend Sally as they survive high school, college, and the collapse of the government, what makes this story work is the underlying heart that is central to all of Anders' work. While the actions these characters take are always wild and surprising, they're never random or without motivation. They follow their own logic, even if it's a logic that I would never be able to predict or replicate.

It's hard to pull out evidence from the book to back up these claims, but I don't want to spoil the surprises and rob anyone of the delight I felt when reading this. But here's this quote, one of my favorite moments, because it seems to encapsulate all of my favorite things about this narrator and this novella. Rock is talking about Sally's refusal to incorporate a love story into their latest film, even when her boyfriend is acting in it too:

"She was just dead set against goo-goo eyes. I always tried to remind her about that old saying, that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, because what could be more romantic than a school of fish, perched on bikes at the bottom of the ocean, pedaling like wild with all their fins?"

The whole thing is just so damn good, just like everything else I've read by Anders. It's hilarious and heartbreaking, laugh and cry on the same page, slapstick and so so serious. 10/10 would ride again.

(Thanks so much to Subterranean Press and Netgally for the advance copy!)

Rock Manning Goes for Broke
By Charlie Jane Anders

This book is....fast. Very fast. The main character Rock is an extremely hyper young boy living in a future time. It's fast, it's confusing, it's like trying to read while hopped up on sugar and caffeine and no sleep for a week.

Frankly, this book is like a story that wants to be good, wants to be grown up, but is still in that 5 year old hyper energy stage. I understood that the main character was trying to "find" himself, but it didn't seem like it was well thought out to me.

I just can't right now with this book. It's not for me and I can freely admit that.

This is an excellent, thoughtful story told in a deceptively simple way. The reader is eased into the story, lulled by its familiar surroundings, almost immediately. Then you get swept away by the actual story being told. This is a big book in terms of ideas, worldbuilding, and message, but it's compact enough to read in a single sitting. I recommend doing that, but then go back to reread at a slower pace to really get all the nuances of what happens. So much thought and care was put into this world that it deserves to be explored as carefully as possible.