Synopsis:
Smith Babbitt is in the prime of his life: he’s only 25 years into his 89-year lifespan.
He knows this because of Timmy®, the mysterious app that can tell you with infallible accuracy how old you will be when you die. Smith still has 64 years to go. But lately he’s been in a rut, and his long lifespan is starting to feel like a sentence.
Possible salvation arrives in the form of Mavis Pead, a co-worker at Smith’s demoralizing job. Smith is infatuated, despite the age difference: Mavis has just entered the last of her 43 years. She’s a “zero” – the most shunned demographic in society. When a careless act leads to their boss’s apparent death before his time, Smith and Mavis are thrown together in an intrigue that could call Timmy®’s infallibility into question. Mavis might not be so old after all – nor Smith so young.
A laugh-out-loud sendup of a technologically dependent culture, Zero is also a tender love story and a big-hearted reflection on the true meaning of age. A story that asks the question, What do we do with the time we’re given, whether we know how long we have…or we don’t?
Favorite Lines:
“I don’t want to waste my life, that’s all. And I wish I didn’t have to know how much of my life is still left for me to waste.”
“Here I am. My wholeness is not determined by the sum of my parts.”
“What a cruel fate to be human, to comprehend our mortality but have no idea what it means.”
“I still have a little time left.”
My Opinion:
I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.
Zero is one of those rare dystopian novels that feels both absurd and uncomfortably real. O’Leary builds a world where technology predicts your exact lifespan down to the year, where aging is a countdown, and where morality and bureaucracy mix in a gray, numbing fog.
The narrator, Smith, is painfully awkward, overthinking everything from his boss’s smile to the ethics of approving medication for his own father. He’s not a classic hero — just someone trying to survive inside a machine that’s both literal and societal. I found myself cringing for him, then rooting for him, then realizing he’s just one of millions quietly losing themselves in the monotony of data, rules, and meaningless metrics.
What really works here is O’Leary’s tone — dry, darkly funny, and relentlessly sharp. Every office scene feels familiar, even though it’s set in a future where people measure life in countdown clocks instead of birthdays. The satire hits close: the mandatory “handbook acknowledgments,” the boss who mistakes control for care, the idea that emotional exhaustion has become a corporate performance metric. It’s the kind of story that makes you laugh and then immediately feel slightly nauseated for doing so.
Summary:
Overall, if The Office and Black Mirror had a bleakly funny child, it might look like Zero. It’s part dystopian satire, part existential meltdown, and perfect for readers who love dark humor, speculative fiction, and character-driven narratives about bureaucracy, mortality, and meaning.
This isn’t a novel about saving the world — it’s about trying not to disappear inside it. Happy reading!