October 21 2025, 17:42

Moderation

Author: Elaine Castillo

First published: 2025

~ 105,000 words. Third person limited. Girlie Delmundo.

It’s been a while since I last posted a review. I’m a fast reader, but I tend to read in short bursts, perhaps twenty minutes once or twice a day. The blurb and jacket description (and opening third, tbf) make you think it’s a techno thriller, but it pivots around the halfway point into clear literary romance territory, which I wasn’t expecting.

Girlie Delmundo is a content moderator specialising in taking down child abuse videos for a global social media company . She seems completely disassociated from any feelings this brings up for her, and her excellence in the role brings her to the attention of new bosses. She’s headhunted into a role moderating a virtual reality world called Playground. Her new manager is William, a man as distant and awkward socially as she is, who it turns out is one of the few remaining initial employees of the company that built Playground, and he has a surprising agenda.

In the opening chapters, there are deliberately graphic descriptions of the awful videos content moderators have to assess, and it’s implied that something from Girlie’s past allows her to be able to do the job she does. There are also detailed descriptions of Filipino family dynamics, the American class system, the experiences of the Filipino diaspora in California and Las Vegas, the effects of capitalism on... everything. Girlie’s family becomes a vital part of the story.

The technology created to give access to Playground is described evocatively and realistically. One of the themes is how VR technology can be used to create both healing and traumatic experiences (and everything in between), but it’s easy to get confused about what is real when you are wearing a full bodysuit that simulates the sensations of reality. There is also the question of what is being done with all the data. Capitalism demands profit, and it treats data as a resource to be mined.

There is a promise of darkness in the first half of the book that doesn’t ultimately get fulfilled. It’s a story about a woman breaking down the emotional barriers she’s created inside herself and falling in love. The descriptions and depth of thought that’s gone into the world are amazing. Writing a novel is another way to create a world to lose yourself in. There’s a lot of different things happening in this book, and it's not wholly successful for my taste, but there's so much to admire.

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