Andrea Donahue Character Analysis

Andrea is a middle-aged woman who works as a herald for Death-Cast. Andrea believes that she’s exceptional at her job because she’s discovered a useful hack to get her through her shifts: she doesn’t think of Deckers as people. To her, they’re already dead, so it’s easier to think of them as just a list of phone calls to get through. Though she thinks her record of 92 phone calls in one shift is something to celebrate, this wound up getting her investigated by HR for rushing. When readers meet her, she contents herself with around 60 phone calls in a three-hour shift. Her numbers, however, only tell part of the story—from the perspective of the people she calls, Andrea is callous, cold, and insensitive. When she calls Mateo, she calls him Timothy (the last person she called), which falsely raises Mateo’s hopes that he’s not going to die today. Her insensitivity even makes Mateo hang up on her, something that’s wildly out of character for him. Andrea desperately hopes to avoid more investigations, as she needs her job. She suffered an accident months before the novel begins, and so she’s temporarily disabled and undergoing intensive physical therapy—which Death-Cast’s generous benefits package covers. She also needs the paycheck to pay her daughter’s school tuition. Through Andrea, the novel paints a nuanced picture of how and why people take seemingly heartless jobs like hers. They, too, are human and need to survive, even if it means doing a job that, to others, looks like selling one’s soul or sacrificing one’s humanity.