One of the joys of being a professional book critic: the moment when you hit a passage you absolutely know you’re going to painstakingly type into a browser and quote at length to show off an author’s style. One of the joys that comes less often but for that is all the more joyful: when you’re a third of the way into the book and you can’t decide which passage to quote because literally you could lift paragraphs out of this whole thing and each one would be as good as the previous. This happened while I read Hilary Leichter’s debut, Temporary, and I have quoted a lonnnng passage from this book toward the end of the review, which I chose after days of internal debate.

But before we get there, I need to ask you a few questions. Have you ever been mauled by the grinding cogs of a thankless job? Forced yourself to laugh along with a boss’s flirting? Spent days working on a project only to discover that the next project renders the first project irrelevant? Spent days waiting for a temp agency to find you something, anything, so you can make rent this month? Please? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you have been waiting for Hilary Leichter’s debut. If I had to sum it up in a non-spoiler way, I’d say it’s a surreal tale of a temp worker going from job to job with increasingly spec fic results.

But more than that, this book is taking a long hard look at work, the way a job can commodify us and strip us of our humanity, and it does it while being uproariously funny.

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