Break Room is sharp, anxious, and brutal, less about winning a reality show than about what happens when the mask you wear at work gets ripped off on camera.

Miye Lee takes a simple premise and twists it into something deeply uncomfortable. Eight people arrive thinking they’ve been chosen for an award. Instead, they learn they were voted in by their own coworkers as the office villain. They are then given a choice: participate in a reality TV show where villains compete against one another, or walk away knowing exactly how they are seen.

The game mechanics are clever, with alliances, suspicion, and the added paranoia of a hidden mole, but the real tension comes from the social fallout. Everyone is forced to sit with the question they avoid at work every day: how am I actually perceived when I leave the room?

Lee’s writing is clean and controlled, almost deceptively calm. The humor is dark and dry, landing in moments where you catch yourself laughing and immediately feel uneasy about it. Short, fast, and unsettling, Break Room reads like a social experiment you wish you hadn’t agreed to watch, but can’t stop thinking about once it’s over.

#BreakRoom #MiyeLee #Bloomsbury

Break Room is a captivating and suspensful novel about a group of contestants in a game show revolving around the unspoken rules of the the office break room. I think the characters were all interesting in their own way and I was hooked with trying to figure out who the mole was along with our main character and narrator Ice Cube. I think each character was explored fully with their own little office quirks and the way they decided to deceive the game and break the unspoken office rules to gain hints on the others.

I think the story is also great reflection of how our behaviors even when meant to be innocent or we think are not noticed are and how it effects the people we work closely with but also gives the perspective of the people we judge and seeing it from their perspective when in the workplace. It really raises the question of office villians and if there are truly office villians if it is simple just taking coffee mixer or having too many tumblers in the fridge.

Mi-ye's writing despite it being a game with little stakes, made me as a reader feel like this was a game of life and death with the way Ice Cube and the others were playing and there was a layer of suspense that I think showed Mi-ye talent.