Mona At Sea

Product Description

Named Most Anticipated of 2021 by The Rumpus * Betches * Frolic * and The Millions!

“A delightful debut…James is a writer to watch.” — ADAM JOHNSON, National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son

A darkly funny coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of the Great Recession that takes the audience on a wild journey through a strange, uncertain modern America. For fans of Chloe Caldwell’s I’ll Tell You in Person and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

Mona Mireles is a quintessential overachiever: a former spelling bee champion and valedictorian of her college class, she has a sterling résumé and a wall of plaques and medals in her bedroom that stretches floor to ceiling.

She’s also broke, unemployed, back at home with her parents, and completely adrift in life and love.

Mona is seven months out of college and desperately trying to reassemble the pieces of her life after the Wall Street job she had waiting for her post-graduation dissolves in the wake of the Great Recession. When her reaction to losing her job goes viral and she is publicly branded the “Sad Millennial,” Mona begins a downward spiral into self-pity, bitterness, and late-night drunken binges on cat videos. Mona’s the sort who says exactly the right thing at absolutely the wrong moments, seeing the world through a cynic’s eyes.

Set in suburban Tucson amid the financial and social malaise of the early 2000s, 23-year-old Mona must not only find a job, but quickly learn to navigate the complexities of adult relationships within the black hole of her parents’ shattering marriage.

At her mother’s urging, Mona grudgingly joins a support group for job seekers, and slowly begins to see that all is not lost, and that perhaps losing the job on Wall Street was a blessing in disguise. She might even
 learn what it is she finds meaningful in life. The question is:

Will she be brave enough to go after it?   

Review

“Mona at Sea is a hilarious, high-octane novel about coming into one’s own without coming undone. The millennial, bicultural narrator, Mona Mireles, is smart and skewering, contending with a troubled past threatening to derail her present. Elizabeth Gonzalez James is a fresh new voice in contemporary literature. Bienvenida!”
— Cristina García, author of Here in Berlin and Dreaming in Cuban

”
Mona at Sea reads like an intimate late night conversation with the friend you never knew you needed. Written with humor and insight and vulnerability, it’s a tribute to the struggle to stay upright as the world around you comes falling down.”
— Mat Johnson, author of Pym and Hunting in Harlem

“Touching on themes of ambition, addiction, and adulthood,
Mona at Sea is a charming debut.”
— Julie Zuckerman, author of The Book of Jeremiah

“This millennial coming of age story is a sharp, witty take on the Great Recession. Mona Mireles is the perfect narrator–overly critical, self-deprecating, bitingly honest, and very, very funny. Her keen observations about life, work, and love during the less than halcyon days of the early 2000s are almost compensation for having lived through them. I loved this book!”
— Janis Cooke Newman, author of A Master Plan for Rescue and Mary: Mrs. A. Lincoln

“Years from now, when I try to remember what the last decade felt like, I will return to this remarkable debut. Elizabeth Gonzalez James writes with a rare combination of wit, style, and heart, and in Mona she has created the perfect hero for navigating all the absurdities and anxieties of contemporary America.” — Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men and creator of AMC’s Lodge 49

From the Back Cover

Named a Most Anticipated book of 2021 by Apple Books * Harper’s Bazaar * 
Buzzfeed Books * Popsugar and The Millions!

“Caustically funny and revealing… Fans of Stephanie Danler’s
Sweetbitter and Sally Roo