A college grad with the six-figure debt to prove it, Ethan Block views San Francisco as the place to be. Yet his job at hot new dating app DateDate is a far cry from what he envisioned. Instead of making the world a better place, he reviews flagged photo queues, overworked and stressed out. But that's about to change.
Reeling from a breakup, Ethan decides to view his algorithmically matched soulmate on DateDate. He overrides the system and clicks on the profile. Then, he disappears. One minute, he’s in a windowless office, and the next, he’s in a field of endless grass, gasping for air. When Ethan snaps back to DateDate HQ, he’s convinced a coding issue caused the blip. Except for anyone to believe him, he’ll need evidence. As Ethan embarks on a wild goose chase, moving from dingy startup think tanks to Silicon Valley’s dominant tech conglomerate, it becomes clear that there’s more to DateDate than meets the eye. With the stakes rising, and a new world at risk, Ethan must choose who—and what—he believes in.
Please Report Your Bug Here is the debut novel by Josh Riedel. Releasing on January 17, 2023, Henry Holt & Company provided an early galley for review.
From his bio on his website, Riedel has experience working on apps - having been the first employee for Instagram before pursuing Masters degree in fine arts. He also lives in San Francisco where his story takes place. As we always say in the writing group I moderate for our library, drawing upon what you know from real life always helps when crafting your story. I appreciated the various literary and musical references in the book. It gave me insight into the author's tastes and influences.
Coming from a previous software development background, I could relate to Ethan's daily routines, the specifics about how the DateDate app worked and the challenges around supporting it. That resonated with me and also reminded me why I was glad I no longer worked in that field. The choice to not give names to a lot of characters (referring to them instead by their job titles and such) helped emphasize the sometimes faceless nature of corporate work-life.
What really kept me disoriented and at times very confused was the science-fiction elements. Which is a shame as I usually enjoy a good sci-fi tale. Here they were mysterious and even a bit nebulous; that made them hard to keep me interested and focused. I was enjoying the personal elements and their commentary on society, yet the portal mystery ended up distracting and derailing that for me.
All in all, there were a number of parts I really enjoyed as well as how the writer used them to make commentary on today's world with its technology dependency. There is a really good message in this story about that.
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