Valley Verified
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When a fashion writer dives headfirst into the cutthroat Silicon Valley tech world, her future threatens to unravel in this addictive novel by Kyla Zhao, author of The Fraud Squad.
On paper, Zoe Zeng has made it in New York’s fashion world. After a string of unpaid internships, she’s now a fashion columnist at Chic, lives in a quaint apartment in Manhattan, and gets invited to exclusive industry events.
But life in New York City isn’t as chic as Zoe imagined. Her editor wants her to censor her opinions to please the big brands; she shares her “quaint” (read: small) apartment with three roommates who never let her store kimchi in the fridge; and how is she supposed to afford the designer clothes expected for those parties on her meager salary?
Then one day, Zoe receives a job offer at FitPick, an app startup based in Silicon Valley. The tech salary and office perks are sweet, but moving across the country and switching to a totally new industry? Not so much. However, with her current career at a dead end, Zoe accepts the offer and swaps high fashion for high tech, haute couture for HTML. But she soon realizes that in an industry claiming to change the world for the better, not everyone’s intentions are pure. With an eight-figure investment on the line, Zoe must find a way to revamp FitPick's image despite Silicon Valley’s elitism and her icy colleagues. Or the company’s future will go up in smoke—and hers with it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zhao (The Fraud Squad) returns with a mediocre story of an emerging fashion writer who faces sexism after pivoting to the tech industry. Zoe Zeng toils at a second-tier New York City fashion magazine for low pay. At a clothing launch, she meets Bill, the CEO of a startup called Fit-Pick, and he offers her a marketing job. The app allows users to post two choices for an outfit and have others vote to see which they prefer. Zoe appreciates the democratic and empowering ethos behind Fit-Pick—users are meant to develop confidence in their fashion choices based on encouragement from others, rather than blindly follow queues from influencers—and she decides to leave New York for the higher paying role in Silicon Valley. There, under pressure to create a marketing plan that will impress the company's top investor, Zoe unwisely recruits a group of influencers to promote the app. The strategy backfires after one of the influencers and Fit-Pick are called out for posts with doctored images, and the blame falls on Zoe. The character work is paint-by-numbers—Bill is a stereotypical sexist bro who cuts corners to wow investors, and the firm's nerdy male coders bully Zoe—and the happy ending feels implausible. There's not much here to recommend.
