Very Bad Company by Emma Rosenblum

Narrated by January LaVoy

Standalone Corporate Thriller

My thanks to Netgalley, Macmillan audio and Flatiron books for providing an advance listening copy for review purposes. Ana’s Attic accepts no compensation for reviews, and all reviews contain my honest opinion. This post contains affiliate links.

Very Bad Company is the perfect name for this darkly funny novel about corporate greed. It was a kind of combination of The White Lotus, We Crashed, and The Dropout (Elizabeth Holmes story). This is not my normal type of read, but I want to branch out a little more and this one really appealed to me.

The tech startup Aurora is headed to Miami for its annual high-level corporate retreat. The company is on the verge of being sold, and all the players stand to make millions more than they already do if the sale goes through. Based on the blurb and the first few chapters, I thought the focus would be on Caitlyn Levy who was just hired as events manager for $2.5 million a year. Aurora doesn’t do events, so she wasn’t even sure of her job description, but who could turn down that salary offer?

The eccentric, yet charming CEO, Caitlyn, the Head of People (HR), and 3-4 other characters each have their own POV and they are each similarly horrible people. With one narrator (who was still phenomenal) it made it so hard to keep track of all the players. They were all alike in too many ways. While I thought the story was about Caitlyn initially, it seemed that each character had almost as much page time as the book went on. I think it would have helped if I stopped and made a list of each player, but I listened on a long drive and wasn’t able to.

Lying, cheating, drugs, affairs, fucking, and even covering up a murder, each and every character was horrible. All they cared about was that the sale went through, and they were willing to cover up anything so it would.

A few times during the first third I thought about DNFing. In the beginning I was lost because I just couldn’t keep up with all the points of view, but I eventually caught on. I kept going because I was so hoping for a big revelation in the end but instead of ending with a bang, it just kind of fizzled out, disappointing me.

Though Very Bad Company was entertaining and kind of fun at times, I think in this case the audio made it harder to follow despite January LaVoy doing a wonderful job with the narration. If I were reading I could easily thumb back a couple of pages to see whose POV we are in, but with audio you really can’t.

The Down & Dirty:

Very Bad Company by Emma Rosenblum was entertaining, but in audio I found it very difficult to differentiate between the multitude of Points of View. The characters themselves were all very similar and I never really got to know any enough to find redeeming qualities. Once I finally got the characters straight, the story was interesting, but when I expected a big bang of a climax, there was a fizzle.