Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Review: The War on Sarah Morris by Kathleen Jones

 


Genre: Coming of Age

Description:

“ONE DAY, YOU’RE A VALUED EMPLOYEE OF THE COMPANY … THE NEXT DAY, YOU’RE BEING PUSHED OUT THE DOOR.

What happens when your secure corporate job suddenly becomes precarious? Book editor Sarah Morris finds herself in this predicament when the company she has served for twenty-one years is reorganized. Sarah’s boss gives all the company’s book editing projects to freelancers and a pet employee, unofficially demoting Sarah, who must spend her days tagging documents. And when Sarah’s boss starts bullying her, she realizes that she’s been pigeonholed into a dead-end job.”

Author:

“Kathleen Jones was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada and graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in English literature. For thirty years, she toughed it out in the corporate world, chiefly as an editor for various Canadian book publishers. Sometimes, Kathleen had the opportunity to do work that she enjoyed, but too often, she didn’t. Towards the end of her career, the type of work that interested and challenged Kathleen began to slip away, and she became less and less happy.

Then one day, Kathleen realized something: creative, out-of-the box thinkers like her don’t belong in the corporate world, and if she wanted “meaningful” work, she would have to create it for herself.

That was when Kathleen decided to pursue the only work that she’d ever really wanted to do since she was a child: the work of a novelist!

Today, Kathleen is a full-time author who writes for a number of popular book blogs. She also contributes monthly book reviews to Goodreads. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.”

For more, visit her website her website.

Appraisal:

I struggled to even decide what genre to indicate this book fit in. The small publisher that published this book describes themselves as specializing in non-fiction genres “such as memoir, autobiographical fiction, poetry, or a combination.” While I’ve never heard the term autobiographical fiction before and it seems like two words that contradict each other, what they mean by that is easy enough to figure out and based on the author’s biography this novel almost surely has some degree of that. But what I could be sure of is that while far from what we think of or the typical definition of a coming-of-age story, that description still seems to fit this one as the protagonist struggles with life’s changes and how to deal with them in the same way as a teen trying to move into adulthood might.

However, unlike a coming-of-age story, the ideal reader for this is probably a touch older. To really get into the story of Sarah Morris, I think a reader needs to be old enough to be somewhat established in their career, possibly seen and struggled with unanticipated changes, or at least observed others deal with that struggle. Those in this position will understand where Sarah is coming from and get sucked into the story, wondering how it is going to end.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues

Rating: **** Four Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 75-80,000 words

1 comment:

Judi Moore said...

It's also an interesting way to illustrate how labour is treated these days. Here in Britain the deskilling going on is pitiful. The polarisation of labour (and remuneration, and job satisfaction) is just awful.

Sounds like a chilling read.