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A bold and inventive novel about real romance in the virtual workplace— bringing Castillo’s trademark wit and sharp cultural criticism to an irresistible story about the possible future of love.

Girlie Delmundo is the greatest content moderator in the world, and despite the setbacks of financial crises, climate catastrophe, and a global pandemic, she’s going places: she’s getting a promotion. Now thanks to her parent company Paragon’s purchase of Fairground—the world’s preeminent virtual reality content provider—she’s on the way to becoming an elite VR moderator, playing in the big leagues and, if her enthusiastic bosses are to be believed, moderating the next stage of human interaction.

Despite the isolation that virtual reality requires from colleagues, friends, and family, the unbelievable perks of her new job mean she can solve a lot of her family’s problems with money and mobility. She doesn’t have to think about the childhood home they lost back in the Bay Area, or history at all—she can just pay any debts that come due. But when she meets William Cheung, Playground’s wry, reticent co-founder (now Chief Product Officer) and slowly unearths some of his secrets, and finds herself somehow falling in love, she’ll learn that history might be impossible to moderate and the future utterly impossible to control.

Don't just take our word for it...

“Castillo’s flinty satire of the tech industry [transforms] into a sultry romance novel. As we watch Girlie’s defenses melt, the book shows a woman slowly surrendering to human experiences that can’t be controlled.”
– The Atlantic

“A story made fresh by a vivid and dexterous narrative voice, a voice that is by turns sardonically attentive to the specificities of each world and alive to the interfaces between them. A voice that lays worlds open for us to read.”
– Locus

“A love story for those who love Severance (both Ling Ma’s book and the unaffiliated Apple TV+ series), Moderation is ambitious, challenging, and brilliant.”
– Elle

Taste the very first page

Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one of the very best. All the chaff, long ago burned up by unquenchable fire: the ones who had hourly panic attacks, the ones who took up drinking; the ones who fucked in the stairwells during break time, the ones who started bringing handguns to the office, the ones who started believing the Holocaust had never happened, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that no one had ever been to the moon at all, or that every presidential candidate was picked by a cosmic society of devils who communicated across interplanetary channels; the ones who took the work home, the ones who never came back the same, or never came back at all. The floor was now averaging only three or four suicide attempts a year, down from one or two a month. The ones who remained, like her, were the wheat: the exemplars, tested paladins, the ones who didn’t throw up in the hallway and leave the vomit there. They’d been, to continue speaking of it biblically, separated.

None of the white people survived. Not that there were that many of them to begin with. Young middle-class hopefuls bulging…

August 2025