I had high hopes for this Dutch translation. The premise is something similar to The Circle by Dave Eggers. An examination of working in the social media field and the resulting mental effects of being bombarded with traumatic videos on a regular basis. It's an interesting psychological exploration delivered in a tight clip that does result in a lot of thought provocation and has some incredibly smart ideas. This short novella had some interesting observations and some good psychological analysis, but in the end it ended up not really going much of anywhere.

Things start off well, with an introduction to the company and the requirements of the job. There is plenty of discussion of nondisclosure and privacy requirements along with the guidelines by which Kayleigh and her coworkers must decide what is allowed to be posted and what must be removed. This was thoroughly completed and really set a great tone for the story. However, it somewhat stalled out after that and became just a repetition. The discussion of the relationships between the coworkers was touched on lightly, with no real getting to know the characters. There was a lot of telling rather than showing and so the entire narrative felt a little less revealing and intense than it otherwise could have been. Though there were psychological effects of their employment that definitely intensified over time, they weren't demonstrated in a highly impactful way and I feel like they could have been written more intensely.

This is meant to be a shocking novel, but it just didn't meet that bar for me. Yes, there were mentions of violent issues and things that maybe didn't sit quite right, but it was done in a way that made it feel somewhat removed. Being a novella, I think there just wasn't enough exploration of the topic and development of the characters. The secondary characters were more extranneous and they really needed to be drawn more tightly into the plot.

The ending also did not help. I understand what it was meant to demonstrate, but it kind of came out of left field and didn't seem to give enough closure to the story. Instead, it felt like the tale just stopped right in the middle of a chapter.

The story does give a lot of information that stimulates thought and the writing was decent, so the concept itself was good. The execution just needed more fleshing out.