Review: Office Girl by Joe Meno

Young adult angst. Talk of the world coming to an end. Office Girl, the fantastic new novel by author Joe Meno, reminds us that indeed we have been there and done that. Yet some stories never grow old.

Set in 1999 as Y2K looms large and President Clinton’s impeachment trials play out in the background, Office Girl takes place in a wintry Chicago. Odile is the office girl in the title, just coming out of a romance with a married man. She is trying to make sense of her life having dropped out of art school and flitting from one boring office job to the other. Eventually she lands a night sales job at a Muzak company selling office music to doctors’ offices. Here she runs into Jack Blevins, a 25-year-old who is just beginning the divorce process after his wife, Elise, leaves him and moves to Germany. Office Girl is essentially a love story—it is about Jack’s and Odile’s wary yet loving moves back into some kind of tentative relationship.

The rest of the review is here.