Ripe Book Review

 Hi bookworms! Today I’m going to be sharing my review about Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter! This is a literary fiction novel that I checked out from the library. Let’s get into it!

Ripe is set in modern day San Francisco Bay Area. Our main character is a young woman who is working in a corporate hellhole at a tech company. This book is a great critique on the state of San Francisco as a whole, but specifically the vast differences between how the homeless there live and how the “tech bros” live. Huge wealth gap and quality of life gap. The critique is done very well and I appreciated the author talking about that. Adjacent to that, the author discusses late stage capitalism, it’s effects on our harsh, modern world, and how it’s wrecking people’s mental health, physical health, and overall lives.

The other theme in Ripe is mental health. Our main character has been struggling with depression her entire life. Her depression is symbolized by a black hole that floats in front of her and follows her wherever she goes. It gets bigger and scarier the longer and more frequent times she’s all alone. But when she’s with her lover or friends, the black hole usually shrinks down to a much smaller size, yet always, it’s still there. I found this black hole symbol to be so accurate to be depicted for depression. I heavily related to the main character for this reason and really empathized with her.

Besides the mental health struggles, there’s another trigger you should know about: abortion. This book shows a great deal of the struggle the main character goes through when she gets unexpectedly pregnant and decides what to do about it. The author didn’t write about abortion in any judgmental way, it was crystal clear and just blunt. It highlighted that women NEED to have bodily autonomy rights. The author also showed, in being realistic to what many people who’ve had abortions go through, the harsh reality that there’s cruel people who oppose women’s bodily autonomy and confront patients going into women’s health clinics. It mad me so mad and annoyed to read that. But that’s the reality of it. So, if you are sensitive to anything relating to this topic, please be aware.

The ending, I will not share. However, I will say that it really stayed with me for several days after. I kept thinking about it and ruminating on it. There’s different ways you could see how it ended. And for that, I loved it. I give this book 4 stars out of 5. Very well written, handled some very serious topics very well, but the starkness of reality laid bare on the page kinda depressed and worried me lol. That’s a me problem though, but because of that and it hitting so close to home, I couldn’t thoroughly enjoy it fully and I’ll never reread this book, so 4 stars it is. I am really looking forward to reading more from this author!

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Until next time, happy reading bookworms!