Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

It's structured as three separate vignettes, each centered on a different first-person narrator. Unfortunately, the voices don’t feel especially distinct from one another (despite being very different people), which makes the shift feel less purposeful and more like a disruption. I was most invested in the first story, and the later sections pulled away from that momentum without adding much in return.

One of the problems with this one is that it actually felt like a non fiction, I felt like I was being educated throughout.

Julius Julius is the first ad man in the world. He built an advertising empire after his first campaign, leading men to a specific brothel. The agency still exists today, still called Julius Julius, and still winning awards for connecting companies with the customers who crave their products.

The building itself it layered with history. There are archives in the basement, where there is a river and a system of caverns. There are dogs who live in the building, a pack of blonde dachshunds who have been there for generations, bringing smiles to the faces of the employees. And the building is filled with ghosts.

There is a Senior Brand Anthropologist who was named to a list of top advertising creatives. She is working on a campaign for the Lumber Board, spending time with trees and thinking about how much wood is a part of our lives. She also collects interesting hampers and it was under her desk that one of the sausage dogs had her puppies. She is stalked by one of the agency’s ghosts, who even manages to take showers in her apartment with Irish Spring, leaving the unused soap behind.

There is a Creative Director who was one of the teenage workers that got hired to install the first elevator in the city. He had been hired there with his friend, who never left the building. A collapse in the caverns took out the group he was in, and every body was accounted for except for his. After the elevator had been finished, this man asked for a job at the agency and ended up working on the National Lime and Chemical Company account, where he made his friend the face of their very successful ad campaign.

Lastly, there is the Account Supervisor, technically still an intern after over two years. Her manager took a leave of absence and never returned, so she had to report to her boss’s boss, who she had a mild crush on. She kept asking for the assessment she was supposed to get after a year, and her boss’s boss kept putting it off. In the meantime, she swam in the pool at the nearby gym and took care of Biscotti, an elderly dachshund, walking her slowly and buying her supplements for her joints. She is the one who figures out how to save the Fisherman Jack tuna account, but she makes people angry, and her future at the oldest ad agency in the world is in jeopardy.

Julius Julius is an offbeat, witty look at the world of advertising and how it disrupts what we know of the world around us. It’s an insider’s look at how the sausage is made, with the charm of sausage dogs running through it. The agency is a strange mix of old and new, and it draws people to it who want to change the world. It’s funny and biting and fascinating and creative, and it kept me guessing at what was coming next (I was almost never right). I love books like this, stories that leave me a little unsettled because the way I look at the world is off its usual balance. This book is fun and thought-provoking, and it will be haunting me for weeks.

Egalleys for Julius Julius were provided by Penguin Random House Canada through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.

I was about to quit this book, then I noticed that I had only 13 minutes to go in the audiobook, so I made it to the end. Unfortunately, this just wasn’t for me. There are three rambling monologues. I expected the quirky details described in the blurb to be more entertaining. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

Wacky and wonderful. A surprising look at the advertising agency world through the eyes of three intriguing characters, a few ghosts and wiener dogs.