Bellwether, by Connie Willis, narrated by Kate reading, produced by Blackstone Audio, downloaded from audible.com.

Sandra Foster Is a sociologist working for a high-tech corporation. Her project is to find trigger points for what starts a fad. The idea of course is to make those trigger points work for the company. Because she complained bitterly about an assistant who lost her a grant by losing her application, she ended up with Flip. Of course Flip is worse. Flip misdelivers a package to Sandra meant for another scientist and grumbles about taking it to the right office because it is way across the entire building. It says “perishable” so Sandra takes it herself, and by doing so meets Bennett O’Reilly, a scientist who is using monkeys to study chaos theory. When the company decides it has to go after an innovative grant that it is unlikely to get, Bennett and Sandra combine their projects. Since they can’t get monkeys, they use sheep. But it’s pretty hard to teach sheep anything or get them to act in a predictable manner. They picked out one sheep to be the bellwether, the one who is supposed to get the others to follow. Flip is involved in a variety of other misdirected services, and Bennett and Sandra end up spending lots of time together on the project and find they might have something else in common. Sandra ends upconstructing their meeting with the chaos theory, the triggering event being Flip delivering the wrong package to her. It’s a very funny novel. The narrator does a wonderful job of portraying teens who dress in the latest fashion for them, (for Flip this involved wearing duct tape) and branding her forehead with an I. And the book is full of little anecdotes about fads that came and went. Initially, Sandra is trying to find out what the “trigger” was for the fad of women bobbing their hair in the ‘20’s. This is a laugh-out-loud at several points book and unlike other things I’ve read by willis.