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.