“Masterful… Castillo shifts seamlessly in scale and tone, from a wide-angled systems novel to a love story, and from barbed satire to staggering emotional depth.
It’s a triumph.”
Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review
“Sharp, compelling… a slyly brilliant narrative about a Filipino American thirtysomething learning (eventually) to live real life…
Castillo again proves an enviably erudite chronicler of… history, power structures, identity politics, and socioeconomic inequities… Poignant.”
Booklist, starred review
“Castillo raises the bar for writing about tech and virtual reality, family stories, and workplace romances. Castillo’s gorgeous prose infuses both the real world and the virtual reality landscapes with life.
Girlie is an exceptional protagonist, defined by her cutting humor and dogged, almost maniacal independence… and her yearning for true happiness, if she can find a way to let it in.
A brilliant novel with much to say about work, family, excess, identity, and love.”
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Elaine Castillo’s writing is perfectly dialed-in—attuned to her characters on a level that few can achieve. Her wit, incisive understanding, and ability to create a complete picture in just a couple well-structured sentences made America Is Not the Heart and How to Read Now major hits, and those gifts are all present in her latest novel, Moderation…
Moderation is a sharp, absorbing, potent work by one of modern fiction’s smartest voices.”
BookPage, starred review
“A novel is, at its best, a mirror for the mess of the human experience and all the feelings of love, despair, fear, longing, and grief that come with it.
Moderation is that, and it is also a mirror for the modern world, a place where we hide from ourselves in numerous new ways: social media, situationships, video games, virtual reality. Girlie embodies that repression, and as the glossy surface of her character cracks, we catch glimpses of what lies beneath…
Moderation is, at its core, a book about the moment when everything we’ve been repressing comes back to the surface. You can hide from yourself for only so long: until the work day ends, until your favorite show is over, until the feed runs out o content, until the digital tide recedes and all that is left is your broken, beautiful life.”
The Atlantic
“Written in hurtling prose that fires off provocative insights on almost every page, Moderation marks an impressive step forward for this gifted writer.”
The Washington Post
“Moderation is sharply attuned to the costs of employment: financial, emotional, psychic…
Castillo’s close third-person narrative, and her unerring ear for social performance, make for a novel that is often baroquely funny, full of barbed observations that denotate like precision-guided bombs…
That we are not yet buried beneath a Big Tech rubble owes everything to the Girlies of the world.”
The New York Times Book Review
“Biting… Castillo explores the wonders and limitations of technology while skewering its stewards’ appetite for power.”
The New Yorker
“It would be easy to write a hackneyed book about how new technology is scary, how tech billionaires are bad, how profit motive will overtake the greater good, and how we are societally unprepared for the pace of advancement that is being laid out before us…
Instead, Castillo writes a love story, neither trite nor pandering, over this terrain; it is simultaneously an interrogation of capitalism and tech ecosystems… Castillo writes about love like someone who has experienced it with every sense in their body.”
Alta Journal
“Verve and verbal grit… prickly humor… and [a] stubborn sense of history… propel Moderation…
The scenes set in the too-real but also pointedly not-quite-real virtual world that Girlie has to moderate are reliably mesmerizing, and this seduction, Moderation seems to say, may obfuscate the real violence in the not-so-real realms.
And if the current historical moment, per cultural theorist Neferti Tadiar, is defined by the struggle to become human in a time of permanent war, reprieve may come from… fully (re-)inhabiting our human bodies… the possibility—and terror—of desire and love, and the keen recognition of our common humanity, our primal cries for help and banal feelings about community, behind the shifting avatars.”
Rolling Stone Philippines
“Moderation is a highly human story about finding love in a virtual place.”
Vulture
“Moderation is a novel that refuses to do things by halves. It is a piercing, laser-precise exploration of big tech and its imperialist intentions; it is a breathtakingly funny and complex portrait of immigrant communities in America; it is a highly charged, passionate and tender love story, willing to embrace myriad forms of love.
A wonderful book.”
Kaliane Bradley, New York Times bestselling author of The Ministry of Time
“Tender and cutting, engrossing and immediate—Elaine Castillo’s Moderation is a moving meditation on connection, growth, and how, in a world that’s constantly on the verge of ending, one way we move forward is cultivating our own. Castillo’s prose is luminous and lucid, balancing humor and emotion with wicked aplomb.
Castillo expertly stretches the possibility of language; Moderation is infinite.”
Bryan Washington, National Book Award 5 under 35 honoree and author of Lot, Memorial and Family Meal
“With its unyielding density of sharply observed detail, high-resolution psychological drama, and driving narrative momentum, Moderation reminded me that the novel is still the best form of virtual reality we have.”
Jenny Odell, New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
“Castillo’s Moderation is a worlds-spanning romance… 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…
Castillo clearly knows genre-world well enough to know that her virtual needs to be real… It’s the juxtaposition of the science-fictional world with all the other worlds that Girlie and William move through… the work of the irresistible worldly voice… that makes Moderation a success.”
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field
“Elaine Castillo’s Moderation is a captivating exploration of class, race, corporate reification, and love.
Moderation is a near-future masterpiece that challenges our perceptions of identity and connection in the digital age. It is a page-turning read.”
Paul Yamazaki, City Lights Booksellers
“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, “Pick Up the Novel Everyone Will Be Talking About”
“Castillo is a literary firecracker… Reading her is like pressing your finger on a bruise just to feel the thrill.”
Pandora Sykes, Books and Bits
“Be warned: Moderation is far from your typical breezy beach read. Elaine Castillo’s novel is as expansive as the VR landscape her protagonist, Girlie Delmundo, must navigate…
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, “The Best Books of Summer 2025, According to ELLE editors”
