At DMI, we honor employees quarterly and annually. Examples of our awards include the “Hi-Five Award,” recognizing a team or project that delivered measurable results, the “Carpe Diem Award,” recognizing an employee who took an innovative idea and successfully ran with it, the “All-Star Award” for mentorship as well as “Rookie of the Year Award” for new employees. This story is told from Bonnie’s perspective, exploring her early life, present day as a late 30s-early 40s woman, and some incredibly tragic events in her 20s. Bonnie lives a quiet life with not much color — she longs for connection, to feel loved but is wholly unequipped to seek out or maintain healthy relationships. Companies may be either public or private; the former issues equity to shareholders on an exchange, while the latter is privately owned and not regulated. The book is advertised as being quirky, and as I said, quirk doesn’t have to work just because there’s weirdness. I will say that lovers of Three’s Company will be in hog heaven. Bonnie discusses the traits and clothes of all the characters and takes on their lives. If I had loved the show, I’m sure I’d have been drooling over Bonnie’s trip down memory lane, all the minute details she gives about its characters and setting, and the perfect replication, which was indeed clever.

For readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Mona Awad, this fearless debut chronicles one woman’s escape into a world of obsessive imagination. I could go on and on, but it would be more worth your time if you experience this masterpiece yourself! She moves to an isolated compound atop a mountain and brings her obsession to life, recreating the set in painstaking detail. And then she plans to settle into her fantasy. But as she retreats from the world completely, her estranged best friend, Krystal, is determined to keep her from slipping away. An] affecting and ingenious debut... This darkly clever work dramatizes the necessity and fragility of illusions, showing how they can crumble when broadcast to the world. Hutson is off to a brilliant start." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

TRACKING

Not quite an unreliable narrator, we believe Bonnie when she tells us not to chalk her new life up to mental illness (only nihilism and rage), but the longer she lives in the world of Three’s Company, the less healthy she seems. Perhaps punishment is inevitable for those who embrace farce. Our protagonist Bonnie Lincoln finds solace in watching reruns of Three’s Company, a popular sitcom originally aired between 1977-1984, after a traumatic event that alters her life irrevocably. Some years down the line, when she comes into a large sum of money after winning the lottery she decides to leave everything and everyone behind and create her alternate reality, modeling her new life along the lines of her favorite television show. I should add that money is no problem for Bonnie because she's just won the biggest lottery payout in US history! She moves to a remote locale and uses her winnings to build a replica of the show's set, including the apartment building the cast members lived in and the surrounding businesses that resemble a small town. Then she begins living her 'dream come true' by immersing herself in becoming the cast members. Bizarre, right? Thank you to Edelweiss+ and the publisher W.W. Norton & Company for the ARC of this novel. One's Company is released on June 14th, 2022 Oh boy. This one was a doozy and quite honestly unlike anything I’ve ever read. One’s Company is the story of Bonnie Lincoln. From the start, it’s clear Bonnie has some eccentricities and prefers to keep to herself, which are a result of her own upbringing and of a traumatic incident that killed most of her adopted family and resulted in her own sexual assault. Her main escape from her memories and her PTSD is her favorite show - Three’s Company.

This is a thought-provoking book you’ll want to discuss with others. I felt at times Bonnie was an unrel I was functionally human. Why, then, had that life always felt like a pastime, just something I was doing while waiting for my other self, the actualized, better version of myself, to come along and make it real?This book is such a savvy, deadpan, moving meditation-unto-absurdity on obsession and trauma and throwaway television and the ways that our hobbies can hurt us and heal us and sometimes overwhelm us. I absolutely loved it." - Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You