The premise of this book was very intriguing and alluring, but the execution fell a bit flat for me. I feel like it never really accomplished the commentaries it was trying to make and the ending felt oddly unfinished.

I honestly don’t know how to feel. It was written well, but at the end of the day…what was the point? I think maybe I am just not the right reader for this and that others would fair better with it.

Joanne McNeil’s debut novel follows a woman named Teresa Kelly, who has spent years moving from one job to another, but has never stayed in one position long enough to build a career out of it.

Middle aged, single, and living with her mother now, she receives a call about a contract driving position at a large corporation called AllOver. The job, posted on Craigslist, advertises the company’s need for drivers, however, applicants do not need a vehicle or any driving experience.

Teresa soon learns of the program she’s been hired for; the CR, a driverless and “economical and comfortable transportation alternative for customers to live their best lives as they journey from one part of the city to another.”

The CR has been advertised to its users as driverless, however Teresa has been hired as part of an undercover pilot program to steer the vehicles onto the road, and to drive customers, who are unable to see her, to their requested destinations. While the cars appear to be driverless, Teresa and her CR colleagues are controlling them.

Teresa can also monitor the customers, watching and listening to them while they are in her CR. “She will wonder if it’s better for her sanity to keep the sound from the carriage off, but for now, the passengers are her connection to the world, even if she cannot engage with them any more than she can with the world.”

Wrong Way is an affecting and layered read. I felt Teresa’s loneliness, her longing for connection, and her reminiscing on the past, and what could have been. Feelings of unease were inescapable at certain points in the narrative. The strength of this story for me is with Teresa, the protagonist, as I’ve been unable to stop thinking about her.

We've all heard horror stories about autonomous vehicles - Wrong Way explores what happens when a company tries to stand out in that field before they've perfected the technology and the working class that must uphold the facade. Our main character has a long history of job hopping and being let go - never really finding her calling or a position good enough to support her long term. When presented with a position at AllOver - a megacorporation with fingers everywhere - she takes it out of necessity (and with reservation). We follow her through her training and life on the job as she examines her career history and her current season of life.

I am very thankful to FSG x MCD Originals, Netgalley, and Joanne McNeil for granting me advanced digital access to this vastly immersive story collection. This piece hits shelves on November 14, 2023 and I'm so gracious to have received advanced looks inside.

I'm going to have to come back and do a longer review at some point because this book just gave me so much to think about that it's hard to put into words. It's a cold, calculated account of modern working life but it's also full of heart and humanity.

Wrong Way follows Teresa, a woman who has spent her entire adult life constantly shifting between boring jobs. When she gets a job with a company that’s pioneering the “driverless car” industry she thinks that she’s finally found a good job that might make her happy. But soon she discovers that her company is hiding dangerous secrets and intentionally deceiving its customers. Teresa has to decide how to deal with the cognitive dissonance caused by staying at her steady, good paying job while knowing that the company is shady and immoral.

I really didn’t like it. I really REALLY didn’t like it. And to be honest I zoned out a lot near the end so I feel weird about even reviewing it. I didn’t like the writing style. I didn’t like the characters. It had a certain unique style of narration that I strongly disliked. There are flashbacks to Teresa’s past jobs that show how how exploitative they all were and I think that’s a good idea. I think that telling this story through vignettes about all of Teresa’s past jobs leading up to her current one could’ve been a really interesting approach to telling this story. But I thought the way flashbacks were used in this story was clumsy. I do believe it was the author’s choice stylistically to approach the flashbacks the way she did… I just think she made a bad choice.

The only compliment I have to give is that it was short. So I was able to read it in two days and I didn’t have to be miserable for long.

Thanks to NetGalley and MCD x FSG Originals for the ARC of this title.

I really liked Joanne McNeil's first book, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, and the pivot from that (non-fiction) study of our current web and how it's changed to this (fiction) take on the gig economy and what it means to be a part of it seemed like a leap from the outset, but really worked once I got into the book. As a person in the greater (T-accessible) part of Boston, I could deeply visualize the places in this book (and loved the slight shade of the people living "10 minutes outside" Boston that actually have 45-70 minute commutes). There's a real sense of character study here, and my only complaint is that the book feels like it abruptly stops when it feels like there are a few more plotlines to resolve (or at least push slightly further - there's a real sense of life in a pending space throughout the book, so when it just stops it's a bit of a shock).

This is a story about the isolation of modern work. After an initially promising early career in the arts fizzled out, Teresa has found herself struggling to find another, stable career path.  She has moved from job to job and finds it increasingly challenging to pay her bills.  So when a recruiter reaches out for a contract position with AllOver, a major tech company, she is cautiously optimistic, even if it is not clear what the job is.

It turns out that AllOver is launching a fleet of driverless — though not self-driving — cars.  As Teresa moves through training to the job supporting this new initiative, she struggles to reconcile the apparent contradictions in her new role — for one, she is finally making a living wage, but is in a contract position which means, among other things, she can't even access the staff line when she has an issue; for another, AllOver is making a bold set of claims about its new driverless cars but the reality for those directly involved is quite a bit less that the promise — all while reflecting on how she ended up at this point in her life.

This was an interesting book.  It offered a thoughtful exploration of what it is like to work in the gig economy — from the economic uncertainty to the uncertainty about how one will spend any given part of their time, as well as the loneliness and isolation that often comes from the lack of a specific work community.  At its heart, the book is also a story about disappointment, most particularly the disappointment when your life does not turn out the way you expect.  I found the novel's portrayal of the choice Teresa made early in her working life between her career and her personal life, and the long-term and, to her, surprising reverberations of that choice, quietly powerful.

Highly recommended.

I absolutely adored this book about a woman who has worked a series of jobs, and gotten pretty much nowhere in life. She measures her years in good and bad jobs, and the experiences that she lived because of those jobs.

This book came at just the right time for me as I left a job with a company that I was with for a long time. I’ve been having a lot of conversations with friends about burnout, and the rat race that we’re all forced into from the moment we reach young adulthood.

I loved McNeil’s commentary on the corporate world and certain socio-economic groups being on a treadmill that they are unable to get off of. I would compare this book loosely to some of Vonnegut’s work with the sci-fi and satire. Kurt Vonnegut is one of my top 3 authors of all time so for me to say this is kind of a big deal!

I genuinely can’t wait to see what McNeil puts out next, and was incredibly impressed with this being a debut novel.

Check this one out if you like Kurt Vonnegut, satire, sci-fi, technology, and if you hate work!!

**Thank you to FSG Books for my advanced review copy of this book and to NetGalley for the eARC of this title!**

A satire, a meditation on life in the gig economy and the dystopian future that won't be for everyone (it's more than a little disjointed) but which makes its blunt points. As opposed to the usual 20 something in this type of novel, Teresa, the protagonist, is 48 and still living in her mother's house and cobbling together jobs. AllOver is meant to be her salvation but it turns out that she's the driver in the driverless car, a job that's even more soul sucking than the one she recounts. It's thoughtful and interesting. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. A good read.

A strong debut dystopian novel that takes on the gig economy, specifically and capitalism, generally. Could have done with a bit more fleshing out the world building aspects. But overall very solid.

thank you net galley for the arc!

this was an interesting one but for some reason I couldn't really get into it much. but it was v dystopian & anti-capitalist, which is always a fun time. non-linear & wacky which was sometimes confusing and hard to follow. overall a decent time, but not a fav! I reckon I'd give it a good solid 3 stars

Thrilled to get this ARC from FSG as some of my favorite weirdo novels are from them (Annihilation, The Insatiable Volt Sisters, The Rain Heron). Sadly, I didn’t love this one, but I very much appreciate what it was doing.

This is the story of Teresa, a struggling middle-aged woman (yay! For once!) living with her mom. She has a new job as a driver for this massive corporation, and ethical murkiness ensues. She also reflects on past jobs and past relationships.

I do love the wave of anti-capitalist worker stories I’m seeing. It’s commentary that I eat up, so I was glad to have found another one in Wrong Way.

The first part of the book was the best for me. Teresa’s training felt so dystopian and bizarre, and I was full of dread waiting for the reveal of what she’d actually be doing. Once I got there I was horrified. It’s so demeaning and exploitative.

I also liked the questions the book brought up about Teresa’s responsibility or not for what happens in the vehicle. She’s not prepared at all for those situations by her employer and struggles to figure out how to report, which is very believable.

The tone of the story reminded me of something like The Lobster in that it’s very subdued. The intensity is dialed way down. It’s very consistent throughout, and I could get along with it, but it’s definitely a *choice* and not all readers will be on board.

I had a few problems that kept me from rating the book higher. One is that I did not know what to picture. I didn’t understand exactly how the nest worked or how everything was positioned. I don’t know if a diagram is appropriate to add, but I felt like I needed one. 😂

The book also read as muddled and too meandering. I understood why Teresa was reflecting on her job history and that mostly worked for me. I could see a running theme of employer exploitation and issues of privilege. But the reflections on her relationship history felt incomplete and didn’t fit into the story as well. In the present day she has some interest in this guy Al, I think, but there’s not a lot said about it. She has one, long, odd conversation with him near the end about how he feels he’ll step back in time one day - and I truly had no idea what to do with that. It was so twee in a book that otherwise felt nothing like that.

I wanted more focus on the job and the exploitation commentary. I wanted more about Falconer, more tricky situations in the CR, more corporate bureaucracy. There were too many meanderings that just didn’t add to the strongest themes of the story. And I really loved those themes!

I recently read Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee which is a more speculative take on corporate exploitation, and tonally quite different, but I’d still recommend that if you like these dystopian workplace stories. Also Severance by Ling Ma, The Thing in the Snow by Sean Adams, Users by Colin Winnette, and even The City Inside by Samit Basu.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Boston: the not-so-distant future. Teresa has had a long history of transitory employment, but finally it seems the (fictional) internet conglomerate AllOver has offered her a steady job with their “driverless” fleet of cars (or, as they call them, “CRs”). Of course, it’s not what it seems, and she finds herself an invisible “seer” in her AllOver vehicle, witness to a whole host of human behavior when they think no one’s watching. Throughout her rides and her back-and-forth commutes, we’re given a look at her attempts at connection and establishing herself, as she now approaches middle age.

Kudos to McNeil for taking on a fascinating topic. She clearly has a lot to say about the emerging “gig” economy and the massive companies that seem to control it all. Through her MC she manages to convey that dystopian sense of loneliness and isolation for which we’re headed unless things change. Teresa’s an interesting person, a drifter of sorts, and her insecurity serves as a good launching pad for some strong ideas. She and characters around her seem to reject the traditional status symbols of wealth and achievement as benchmarks of success. McNeil’s prose is journalistic but sharp, and she’s good with the occasional metaphor: Teresa’s a swimmer, so “Lap 29” means her 29th year of living and what she was doing at the time. There’s a shocking climax I didn’t see coming, and it livens up the story significantly.

From the beginning, I identified this novel as “high concept.” McNeil employs something of a third-person stream of consciousness style, which means a very non-linear plot and a fluid timeline. Flashbacks abound, sometimes just as I was concentrating on an interesting anecdote. That made the brilliant ideas she proposes hard for me to follow. One character begins to discuss college admissions, for example, and I had a hard time seeing how that fit with the other concepts. Before I could figure it out, we were onto something else. Also, I had a hard time visualizing things, most notably the “nest” in which the AllOver seers “drive” the CRs.

I also found the character relationships odd. There seems to be an affection between Teresa and coworker Al Jin, but he vanishes twice, and she gives him not another thought. Teresa (McNeil) also has a strange way of referring to other characters: “Blue Jeans” and “She Who Gives No F*cks” seem more appropriate for a humor novel. Some characters come out of nowhere with no description, and it takes a switchback to grasp the image. I also might have liked a bit more from her relationship with Sinisa, as it felt unfinished.

Overall, Wrong Way uses an unorthodox storytelling style, but it’s a bold effort, an insightful look at labor relations in the coming world. Readers interested in economics, technology, and even politics will take an interest.

Thank you to the publisher for my ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Wrong Way by Joane McNeil gets released via Farrar, Straus, and Giroux November 14, 2023.

This book won’t be for everyone but it really was the book for me. So often I read books by young MFA grads that glorify or objectify poverty in beautiful sentences and you can just tell they’ve not lived it. I think it helps that the author is a journalist who has intimate knowledge of these issues from talking to the people who have lived this life and covering the social impacts of technology and AI.

It’s very slow paced and not much happens in the story but it’s literary in its deep interiority and exploration of back story, which I appreciated. This is the kind of book that inspires me to write because the attention to craft is so good.

Teresa is stuck in a dead-end life where she takes a series of odd, underpaid jobs in the gig economy. She lands her best job yet for a fintech company that produces driverless cars - or at least, they claim to be driverless, but they are really piloted by a human driver in an extremely uncomfortable portal, like a drone. But it pays better than any of her other jobs and she finally has financial security.

The social commentary in this book was just wonderful. It really digs deep into the psyche and motivations of gig economy workers, AI and the future of labor. Plus the prose was beautiful and Teresa was a fascinating, complex character, if a bit maddening at times.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Interesting premise for a story. Some parallels with reality, I liked this overall. It's a little uneven at times, but a fun story.

Thanks very much for the free copy for review!!

Teresa can’t seem to hold on to a job she enjoys, and the years continue to fly by as she aimlessly wanders from one gig to the next. That is until she answers a job listing for AllOver, a driverless car fleet. With a job that finally pays decently and seems to mirror her beliefs with their mission statement, she will choose to ignore AllOver’s claims as orientation reveals that they may have been stretching the truth to fill the vacant positions.

McNeil wrote this novel well, but, at times, challenging to read. I think the premise was fun, though.
I especially enjoyed Teresa as the main character but didn’t believe she was as old as she said. She seemed to have a juvenile mindset reflected in her inability to hold a job and her blasé attitude towards a career.
Overall, great read. I definitely recommend it.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rating rounded up from 3.5.
This book won't be for everybody, but I really enjoyed it. As someone who's critical of "self-driving" cars, fintech startups, and how they lie about their technologies, this was great. The fictional fintech company AllOver that our protagonist, Teresa, begins working for is like Tesla and Theranos merged into one. Teresa is 48 and recently had to move back in with her mother in a suburb of Boston after being let go from yet another job. She loves to drive and responds to a Craigslist posting asking for drivers. She loves to drive and thinks this is the perfect job for her, maybe one that she can finally stay employed at. She comes to find out the company is deceiving the public. AllOver touts driverless cars for people to use on-demand like Uber, without having to be reminded that a gig worker is likely driving them to the airport in order to feed their families. But the secret is that the cars aren't driverless at all. The drivers are simply hidden in a "nest" so their upper-middle-class passengers don't have to interact with them at all and the company's stock price soars. A terrible reminder that people are disposable to these Silicon Valley billionaires and they will do anything to profit, including putting their employees' lives at risk.

Wrong Way is a novel I was fully unprepared for. Having read the synopsis, I expected the scathing criticism of wealth, capitalism and our crippling economy. What I did not expect was to connect so strongly with the protagonist, feeling her desolation and despair, how her life did not amount to what she expected. McNeil adeptly captured the farce of what many companies call social responsibility, and the reality of the middle class and lack of opportunities for upward mobility. While it is not a cheerful read, it is an important one.