Wrong Way

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.

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.