Moderation
LISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2026
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- €6.49
Publisher Description
Sometimes people just...click.
'A highly charged, passionate and tender love story. Wonderful'
Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time
'Castillo is a literary firecracker... If you liked Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, you'll like this'
Pandora Sykes, Books and Bits
Thirty-something Girlie Delmundo works a day job as a content moderator, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She's one of the best at it, too - dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to wall off all her emotions when she was still a kid - so it's no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big salary rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, lush and near-perfect simulations of civilizations long since dead.
Girlie takes the job, and getting paid to spend her days wandering the crowds of medieval jousts or exploring romantic Left Bank Paris seems too good to be true. Almost. Sure, she signed up for having to deal with the sordidness of pretty much any virtual space, but as she begins to explore the intricate worlds that she moderates, she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just be that long-forgotten thing... Girlie's type.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Castillo's masterful latest (after the essay collection How to Read Now) follows the vagaries of a social media content moderator's work and love lives. The protagonist is known only by her workplace handle Girlie Delmundo—Reeden, her employer, "forcefully suggested" that she and her coworkers use fake names "for the employee's protection—which meant, of course, for the company's protection." Most of them are fellow Filipinas, "people who knew about the job through that reliable job network still unmatched by LinkedIn, otherwise known as family." (Employees of color prove tougher in the face of troubling subject matter.) Girlie specializes in flagging videos of child sexual abuse, and her exemplary work gets her recruited for a position with Reeden's newest acquisition, a virtual reality endeavor called Playground. She develops a rapport with her new boss, William Cheung, and tries to stamp out her burgeoning feelings for him, determined to stay focused on work despite sensing something more than mutual attraction: a "recognition," "alien to alien." As Girlie flags objectionable content in Playground's VR historical theme parks, which include a Gauls vs. Romans battle and the St. Louis World's Fair, she learns more about the original medical applications of Playground's tech, and the fate of its founder, Edison Lau. Castillo shifts seamlessly in scale and tone, from a wide-angled systems novel to a love story, and from barbed satire to staggering emotional depth. It's a triumph.
