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    The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel

    Written by Manuel Gonzales

    Narrated by Sarah Scott, Natasha Soudek, Mike Chamberlain and Susan Hanfield

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In a world beset by amassing forces of darkness, one organization--the Regional Office--and its coterie of super-powered female assassins protects the globe from annihilation. At its helm, the mysterious Oyemi and her oracles seek out new recruits and root out evil plots. Then a prophecy suggests that someone from inside might bring about its downfall. And now, the Regional Office is under attack.

    Recruited by a defector from within, Rose is a young assassin leading the attack, eager to stretch into her powers and prove herself on her first mission. Defending the Regional Office is Sarah--who may or may not have a mechanical arm--fiercely devoted to the organization that took her in as a young woman in the wake of her mother's sudden disappearance. On the day that the Regional Office is attacked, Rose's and Sarah's stories will overlap, their lives will collide, and the world as they know it just might end.

    Weaving in a brilliantly conceived mythology, fantastical magical powers, teenage crushes, and kinetic fight scenes, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is a seismically entertaining debut novel about revenge and allegiance and love.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 12, 2016
    ISBN9780399567445
    Unavailable
    The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel
    Author

    Manuel Gonzales

    Manuel Gonzales is a graduate of the Columbia University graduate creative writing program. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Open City, Fence, One Story, Esquire, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and The Believer. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two children.

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    Reviews for The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

    3.5/5

    114 ratings15 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A highly entertaining satire of the superhero genre. Did it have deeper themes? Would be hard pressed to point to one, but it was well written with characters more interesting than average. I suppose I might say that the book revolves around how putting the ends before the means ends up leading to the destruction of your good intentions and corrupts your values. But beyond that, I will say this is a fast, fun-filled fantasy romp. I chomped it down in a few days.
    • 4/5
      The so-called Regional Office is an organization that uses young super-powered women and precognitive oracles to combat the amassing forces of darkness, while disguised as a super-fancy travel agency. And the Regional Office is, as the title indicates, under attack: by a different group of young super-powered women, and mercenaries, and alienated employees.It's a pretty odd book, but not because of the fantastical elements. In fact, those mostly consist of a collection of fun but familiar fantasy/superhero/action movie tropes (albeit with an interestingly original idea here and there). It's more the way those tropes are approached that's odd, as if the novel's focus is constantly just a little to the left of where you'd expect it to be, taking for granted or leaving unexplained things that most stories would make a point of concentrating on, while focusing on details that most stories would largely ignore. The structure is also odd. Mostly it features the POV of one of two women, each on a different side of the conflict. Within each POV section, very short chapters alternate rapidly between the present action and that character's past, sometimes even featuring flashbacks within the flashbacks. Which maybe isn't too weird, but then there are the sections that are supposedly extracted from a scholarly analysis of the events written many years later, which are full of details that may or may not have happened, presented in a decidedly unobjective style that makes you wonder just who these future scholars are and exactly what they know. Oh, and then there's the interlude that's written largely in first person plural...Not all of this works equally well, I think, but parts of it work brilliantly. In the end, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it all, or quite what I make of it, but reading it was an interesting experience, and mostly an enjoyable one. And I kind of have to admire its audacity.
    • 4/5
      Read this because it was available from overdrive and is on the long list for ToB and NPRs really long list of best reads. This book is a fantasy, science fiction, cyberpunk story of a bunch of super hero women who oppose evil. There is a lot of shifting from viewpoints. Rose is one of the key super women and the book starts with the regional office under attack. I guess there is a lot of pop culture in this book so parts might be familiar to those more aware of this. I wasn't but the author was intentional in doin so. There is references to Ikea and to iMacs and Karate Kid. A lot of humor mixed in with some pretty bloody violence. These young women are outsiders in life. Sarah doesn't fit in and Rose doesn't fit either but one is more comfortable with her not fitting in, the other is quite angry so the book addresses alienation created by that which makes you different even when it is a super power. In a way, I was reminded of Charles Angels. These women were super powers but the decisions about their lives were being made by men or those with more power and they were in many ways victims. The story is entertaining with some substance but unlikely to have the stuff that will carry it to the finals in the ToB.
    • 4/5
      This book is weird and quirky, but once I got into the humor of it and realized that it wasn't taking itself seriously, I found it enjoyable.The humor is often self-referential - Gonzales mashes together a bunch of sci-fi movie tropes, and he doesn't shy away from the fact that that's what he's doing. However, I found the book to be confusing sometimes, because there are two storylines told out of chronological order, and the same characters are in both storylines, and sometimes I had trouble figuring out which was which and how they fit together.As much as this was a fun read, there wasn't really much of a point to it. There wasn't any good vs. evil showdown, or coming of age, or surprising plot twist - it's fun, but it never really goes anywhere.I listened to the audiobook, and it was an enjoyable way to read the book.
    • 3/5
      An interesting premise of a story and structure for the book, but it falls short in execution. The narration starts with Rose. She is a teen-aged super operative with some extraordinary powers. She made me think a of a foul-mouthed Buffy. Rose is leading an attack the Regional Office. The narration switches to Sara, a worker in the Regional Office, defending the attack from Rose's force. Both are supposedly fighting the forces of evil. That leads to some interesting premises, but he book comes up short in developing much more than the premise. The audiobook has high quality narration. I especially like the use of different narrators for the different points of view.
    • 4/5
      If Joss Whedon wrote Die Hard...I think that's a great way to describe this book. It's lady assassins, loads of action, a little love, lots of revenge. Basically, it's some of the most fun you'll have reading a book. Especially if you're like me and enjoy multiple perspectives, flashbacks (maybe even flash forwards), interludes from kind of related documents, pop culture references, and a touch of science fiction. I would've liked a little more at the end, something that offered something more concrete of a finish, tied up just a couple more loose strings. (Is Emma alive or dead, was she magicked into existence?)Perfect for fans of Joss Whedon (especially Dollhouse), Lexicon by Max Berry, Minority Report, and maybe fans of the Ex-Heroes series.
    • 1/5
      I absolutely hated reading this book. From the very beginning I had a hard time trying to get into it. There are multiple POVs, which is never a problem for me unless the writing doesn't agree with me. The writing did NOT agree with me. Not at all. My eyes developed a strong aversion to said writing: the cursing, the sarcasm, the jumping around to different places/characters/times with no apparent reason. More than a few times I felt like the author was trying much muuuch too hard to be clever and cute. Just, no.

      I can't recall how many times I sighed and rolled my eyes while reading this book but suffice it to say it was a looooot. It seemed like something written by a high school student who consumes too much caffeine on a daily basis. I'm unashamed to say that I didn't finish this book; I refuse to waste any more time on it. There are plenty of books better suited to me that are waiting for me to read them.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book. It kept me interested and coming back. I'm going to discuss vaguely why it wasn't five star for me. My biggest difficulty I had was I was unable to like or root for the person who turned out to be the main character. She held a huge grudge about something that happened early in her life but when the hidden truth was revealed she was unfazed and didn't seem to care. Also the story telling was nebulous at times on purpose, saying maybe this happened or maybe it was that, or maybe neither. It was a device I didn't personally appreciate. It also didn't tie up what had happened to everyone although this could be for sequel potential. The good was that the action was well written so I could easily picture it, I liked several other characters and rooted for them and the writing style was never boring.
    • 4/5
      I absolutely LOVED this book. I can't wait for it to come out in April so everyone can read it. I both loved and hated the characters in the best way possible, the story was fantastic, and I adored the way Gonzales wrote the whole book. The premise of female assassins sounds dubious but Gonzales offered a creative take that sucks you in and keeps you. The only issue I had with it was the ending, which left things a little too ambiguous for my liking.

      But overall, a fantastic read from Riverhead Books with my full recommendation!
    • 4/5
      Beautifully written, interesting format, and rather odd. I loved it.
    • 4/5
      A normal day at the office is anything but typical for the employees of the Regional Office. A shadowy organization whose mission is to serve as “a barrier of last resort between the survival of the Planet and the amassing forces of Darkness,” the Regional Office recruits and trains super-powered young women to combat evil. But now, as the title of Manuel Gonzales’ inventive debut novel suggests, the Regional Office is under siege and the organization’s objective is threatened. As the history of the Regional Office and the reason behind the attack is gradually revealed, the narrative switches between characters on both sides of the assault: Sarah, whose loyalty to the Regional Office is unshakeable and whose mechanical arm may or may not have a mind of its own, is on the defensive while Rose, a teenager and newly-minted assassin with everything to prove, carries out the invasion. Filled with pop-culture references and cinematic fight scenes, The Regional Office is Under Attack! will appeal to fans of the Die Hard and Terminator franchises and to frustrated cubicle dwellers alike.
    • 5/5
      I think going into this book mostly blind is the best bet. I was caught initially by the bright cover (of course I was) and intrigued by the sci-fi setting and while I had no expectations of what I was getting myself in to, this book did not disappoint.This book centers around a group of super-powered women who are hired to kick ass and save the world. There is, however, a splinter group of recruits who are being trained to attack and take down the women that run the Regional Office. The plot is a little hard to follow at first, as we’re getting past and present experiences from women on both sides (in a sort of stream of consciousness format): Rose (trained to destroy the Regional Office) and Sarah (a worker at the Office), as well as excepts from some sort of paper written about the founding of the Regional Office and the resulting attack – and we don’t know who wrote that paper.Once I adjusted to the constantly changing viewpoints, this book was a lot of fun. We get a darker look at what it’s like to be super-powered, especially from young, cynical Rose, who is recruited to destroy the Office and nothing quite turns out as she expects.I won’t say much about the plot, but I enjoyed the style of the book immensely – it was fast paced with good action scenes and I enjoyed our two main characters. I’d like to share a couple quotes.Rose’s thoughts about training to be a super assassin:“[It would be like] An Officer and a Gentleman, but without the gentleman bit. Her pitted against the hard-ass drill sergeant. She’d be the spitfire who constantly mouthed off and who would ultimately reveal herself to be pitted against her inner demons, not the drill sergeant at all, and in the process develop a bond with her fellow trainees, becoming in their eyes an example of what not to do, of how not to act, but also, in the end, by the end of boot came or whatever this place was, becoming for them, also, an example of a hard battle fought and won with difficulty, tenacity, and through her indomitable spirit and unfathomable skill.”A letter to Sarah:“We navigate through like with the good-faith hope that we are doing our best, that we are aimed in the right directions, that we are helping the helpless. Maybe we slip, maybe we mess up, maybe from time to time we do things that are less the right thing. Or we cut corners, or we make choices that serve our interests over the interests of those who depend on us, or we hide the consequences of the decisions we have made with the hope that those consequences will never be seen despite how often we make those same decisions. We go back to the ones we love when clearly they do not love us, or do not know how to love us, or show us their love in a way easily mistaken for hate. We are weak in the face of the hard work it sometimes takes to be strong. We convince ourselves (incorrectly) that silence is not a form of consent. We let good people die and sometimes we kill them ourselves and we hide and we hid and we hide and soon hiding becomes the thing we are best at doing.”
    • 4/5
      This book reminded me a little of A. Lee Martinez and Tom Holt — with a bit of Austin Grossman's "Soon I Will Be Invincible" thrown in, and I really enjoyed it. Good characters, interesting structure, hints at The Beyond. Can't wait for Mr. Gonzales's next one!
    • 4/5
      A normal day at the office is anything but typical for the employees of the Regional Office. A shadowy organization whose mission is to serve as “a barrier of last resort between the survival of the Planet and the amassing forces of Darkness,” the Regional Office recruits and trains super-powered young women to combat evil. But now, as the title of Manuel Gonzales’ inventive debut novel suggests, the Regional Office is under siege and the organization’s objective is threatened. As the history of the Regional Office and the reason behind the attack is gradually revealed, the narrative switches between characters on both sides of the assault: Sarah, whose loyalty to the Regional Office is unshakeable and whose mechanical arm may or may not have a mind of its own, is on the defensive while Rose, a teenager and newly-minted assassin with everything to prove, carries out the invasion. Filled with pop-culture references and cinematic fight scenes, The Regional Office is Under Attack! will appeal to fans of the Die Hard and Terminator franchises and to frustrated cubicle dwellers alike.
    • 4/5
      I was crazy about his story collection, The Miniature Wife and Other Stories, so I was pumped about his new novel. It had an off-the-wall premise, which showed much promise. It only partially delivers and never really soared for me. I did like some of it's wry humor and I liked kick-ass Sara, with her cyborg arm. I still give it 3 stars but was hoping for much more.