Rating: 4 stars

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Publication Date: August 13th 2019

The Warehouse is about two strangers who apply for a job at Cloud, a conglomerate company that owns just about everything. You work for Cloud, or you starve. Paxton is coming to terms with working for the company that ruined his life, and hoping for a future with Zinnia, the woman he met when he started his new security job. Zinnia is hiding things and she wants Paxton’s all-access pass, and maybe something she never expected to want.

Several times, I wanted to stop reading this book. Not remotely because it was bad, but because it was scary. The Warehouse is set in the future. The very, very, very near future. I’d go as far as to say that it’s uncomfortably close. Every thing that the workers at Cloud do is tracked by a Cloudband on their wrist, and I found myself looking several times at the smartwatch that I use to track everything from my steps to my schedule to how much water I drink a day. Cloud owns everything, they own the materials and the production and the transportation used to deliver items to customers by drones. Brick-and-mortar stores are dead (this was particularly frightening to read as a retail worker in quiet, rarely visited store). The Warehouse felt like a reflection of something realistic, something that is sitting right on the horizon and waiting to happen. I wanted to put this book down at times because I didn’t want to think about the next forty-five years of my working life and what the world might be like by then. And that’s probably what makes this such an interesting book to read. I’d even say important, because people need to be thinking about the future and what we want to see. After all, the market dictates. 

All in all, though, I’m glad that I read this. I enjoyed it a lot, when I got past the deep horror of how real it was, and the characters were whole and interesting. Paxton and Zinnia felt real and I wanted to know how things worked out for them, and the issues/thriller balance was handled really well, with enough intrigue to keep me turning pages.

Note: This review is copied verbatim from my Goodreads account dated June 21st 2019.