The Regional Office is Under Attack!

Reviews

The plot is as explosively paced as a comic book’s, but juggles some dextrous genre shifts. Gonzales fills the workaday office with a glorious plot, giving voice to the John McClane fantasies lying dormant in cubicles across the world. I inhaled this book so quickly that I missed plot points on first read: best to let it wash over you and then marvel in retrospect at the clues you flew past. “THE REGIONAL OFFICE IS UNDER ATTACK! is an entertaining and satisfying novel. Like the best of the stories it satirizes so gently, it’s rollicking good fun on the surface, action-packed and shiny in all the right places; underneath that surface, though, it’s thoughtful and well considered. Gonzales has created a superheroic fighting force of the kind we’ve grown so used to through constant exposure to the Avengers and various iterations of the X-Men, and then he has turned out their pockets and flipped open their diaries.” “[H]ighly entertaining… Wonderfully strange and fun, Gonzales' novel follows both the women attacking and defending the Regional Office and how their lives intersect.” “A tour-de-force… [R]epurposes the devices of a genre specializing in fantasies of mastery into a portrait of chastened adults moving through a world where mastery eludes us all… [W]hat binds the whole thing together is a persistent, self-contradictory human desire to both be extraordinary and to fit in, finally, somewhere. The Regional Office Is Under Attack! sneaks up on you. It starts out looking like a heist yarn intertwined with a couple of origin stories, but it keeps coming back to the stuff people devour superhero comics and spy thrillers to escape: isolation, confusion, triviality, moral doubt.” “A hugely entertaining read.” Expand reviews