XYZ by William Knight, A Book Review and Blog Tour

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Why I Picked It Up: Having a book with a sense of humor is needed, it helps to lighten the day.  In addition I love the whole generational piece and the question of technology.  It’s often a conversation in our household.

The Official Summary

From a former Guardian and BBC writer, and author of The Donated, comes a hilarious story of mid-life crisis, family, technology, and coping with the modern workplace.

Jack Cooper is a depressed, analogue throwback; a cynical, alcoholic Gen-Xer whose glory days are behind him. He’s unemployed, his marriage has broken down, he’s addicted to internet hook-ups, and is deeply ashamed of his son Geronimo, who lives life dressed as a bear.

When Jack’s daughter engineers a job for him at totally-lit tech firm Sweet, he’s confronted by a Millennial and Zoomer culture he can’t relate to. He loathes every detail – every IM, gif and emoji – apart from Freya, twenty years his junior and addicted to broadcasting her life on social media.

Can Jack evolve to fit in at Sweet, or will he remain a dinosaur stuck in the 1980s? And will he halt his slide into loneliness and repair his family relationships?  

What I Loved

• The tone of the main character felt very familiar.  While he’s older than me, it’s the comments that echo some of the things people that I know feel.  We started life without computers, we either didn’t have cell phones in college or were told to NEVER use the ones that we had and social media certainly wasn’t a thing for a long time.  
• Seeing Jack’s reactions to Sweet was fun.  I kind of feel like I have lived this exact experience. 
• There were some interesting main characters, especially Jack’s daughter (for the most part..I’ll get into that in a moment).  
• It was a quick and fun read!  Nice to have a book like that sometimes.
• Can he really be so clueless about technology and social media?  Oh wait…he actually can be 🙂  It’s humorous.

So, what didn’t I like? 

• Jack…but I also liked him too.  Go figure.   
• As a hiring professional reading about Jack’s onboarding experience for his job makes me cringe, ugh.  

Follow the Author

William Knight has written for the Guardian, the Financial Times and the BBC, among many other publishers. He is a journalist and technologist currently living and working in Wellington, New Zealand.

A graduate engineer, he’s chased a varying career starting in acting, progressing to music, enjoyed a brief flirtation with handbag design, and was eventually wired into technology in 1989.

By 2003 his non-fiction was being regularly published in Computing newspaper in the UK, and he has since written about the many successes and failings of high-technology

The Donated (formerly, Generation), his first novel, was conceived from a New Scientist article in 2001 and was ten years in development. Subsequent novels, XYZ, Foretold, The Fractured, will be available, he says, “Sometime in the future. Hopefully not as long as ten years.” 

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I really enjoyed being a part of this Blog Tour, if you have any you think I might find interesting find my Review Policy here and my contact information here.

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