The plot is as explosively paced as a comic book’s, but juggles some dextrous genre shifts. Gonzales fills the workaday office with a glorious plot, giving voice to the John McClane fantasies lying dormant in cubicles across the world. I inhaled this book so quickly that I missed plot points on first read: best to let it wash over you and then marvel in retrospect at the clues you flew past.

“THE REGIONAL OFFICE IS UNDER ATTACK! is an entertaining and satisfying novel. Like the best of the stories it satirizes so gently, it’s rollicking good fun on the surface, action-packed and shiny in all the right places; underneath that surface, though, it’s thoughtful and well considered. Gonzales has created a superheroic fighting force of the kind we’ve grown so used to through constant exposure to the Avengers and various iterations of the X-Men, and then he has turned out their pockets and flipped open their diaries.”

“[H]ighly entertaining… Wonderfully strange and fun, Gonzales’ novel follows both the women attacking and defending the Regional Office and how their lives intersect.”

“A tour-de-force… [R]epurposes the devices of a genre specializing in fantasies of mastery into a portrait of chastened adults moving through a world where mastery eludes us all… [W]hat binds the whole thing together is a persistent, self-contradictory human desire to both be extraordinary and to fit in, finally, somewhere. The Regional Office Is Under Attack! sneaks up on you. It starts out looking like a heist yarn intertwined with a couple of origin stories, but it keeps coming back to the stuff people devour superhero comics and spy thrillers to escape: isolation, confusion, triviality, moral doubt.”

“A hugely entertaining read.”

“Like the writers he is compared to, Gonzales’s stories’ fantastic premises are always anchored in real-world conflicts that hold universal familiarity. The Regional Office is Under Attack!, …carries some of his stories’ thematic arsenal into a book length narrative… The story nods to tons of tropes—from Kill Bill and Charlie’s Angels to Blade Runner and The Karate Kid—but it frequently subverts those tropes and uses them to flesh out characters that dazzle.”

“The Regional Office really IS under attack! This is not metaphor! It is a wry and propulsive work of inventive fiction by a terrific young writer! Read it!”

“This book is a winged creation, and absolutely marvelous. Gonzales keeps turning the kaleidoscope to reveal the strangest, darkest, and most beautiful dimensions of human love, and the conversion of mechanical fury into living strength.”

“[W]hen it comes to fiction it usually doesn’t bring out the LOLs so much as me laughing on the inside. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find myself cracking up during some of the fight scenes and especially a bunch of the lines with curses while listening to the audiobook of The Regional Office is Under Attack!”

“So fresh and so funny, the pacing is so fast and crackling, you won’t be able to stop reading.”