Madeleine Gray’s debut novel Green Dot arrived littered with positive endorsements, rave reviews and the promise of film and television adaptations lined up before it had even been released. There’s a lot to love about this novel, which follows 24-year-old Hera as she tries to find meaning and connection, and takes a job as a comment moderator at a news website because of the “interior that it allows [her] access to, the vantage point it facilitates”.
This vantage point, as it turns out, offers less access into the interior lives of others than Hera has hoped, and she turns her attention across the newsroom to Arthur, an older journalist who represents the comfort and stability she perceives as markers of adulthood: “I was intoxicated by the promise of ordinary happiness implied by his cargo shorts, by his chemist-bought sunglasses. I was besotted with the way he combined a high-powered job with the nervous shyness of someone who was bullied in primary school and has since taken on knowing timidity as an endearing personality trait. My god, how I wanted him.”
