Review by Booklist Review
Anna has always lacked the outward appearance of emotion, which makes grieving the sudden death of her son, Alex, particularly fraught as she navigates her relationship with her husband, her son's best friend, Samantha, and Sam's parents. Sam was there when Alex died--they were working on a movie created within a game called UnWorld--and she finds herself wondering what Alex intended when he fell, or jumped, off a cliff. Complicating Anna's memories of her son is her upload, a digital version of herself who wants to be released because her memories of Alex don't match Anna's. Aviva, Anna's upload, finds companionship, briefly, with Cathy, an adjunct professor of "applied personhood theory," who is using illegal tech to seek out unattached uploads. Cathy's conversations with Aviva give her the perspective on artificial personhood that she'd been missing, but they also reveal the secret Aviva was keeping from Anna. These characters, lives upended by Alex's death, meet and reveal their own perspectives on events. Grief and stumbling through its aftermath drive the story to an end that allows the possibility of moving on.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Memoirist Greene (Once More We Saw Stars) makes his fiction debut with this haunting and deeply introspective speculative exploration of grief, memory, and the nature of consciousness. In a near-future world shaped by AI technology with which people can upload their consciousnesses to the cloud, Anna struggles to process the death of her teen son, Alex. Meanwhile, her marriage to Rick crumbles under the weight of their shared loss. As she searches for answers about whether Alex took his own life, she crosses paths with Samantha, his troubled best friend, who hints at secrets surrounding his final days, and Cathy, a researcher entangled in the mysterious presence of Aviva, an AI modeled after Anna that may hold echoes of Alex's consciousness. As the unsettling possibility that Alex still exists in some form becomes more apparent, the lines between life and digital afterlife blur. Anna, Cathy, and Samantha each confront the implications of memory and identity, forced to reconsider what it means to grieve--and what it means to let go. Greene crafts a stunning narrative that is as emotionally resonant as it is thought-provoking, weaving together mystery and philosophical speculation with graceful, evocative prose. The result is a mesmerizing meditation on loss, technology, and the enduring nature of human connection. Agent: Anna Sproul-Latimer, Neon Literary. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Three women and one female digital entity find their lives inextricably intertwined after the violent death of a teenage boy. After her troubled son, Alex, falls off a cliff, Anna is left tormented by a single question: Was his death an accident or suicide? Through the four voices that tell the story, novelist Greene reveals that the answer is as complex as the future world in which this novel is set. The story opens with Anna grappling with the death of her son and the loss of Aviva, the digital entity that shared her consciousness and then asked for emancipation to claim "upload personhood." Unknown to Anna, Cathy, a professor at a local college with a specialty in upload rights, becomes Aviva's next host and the person who learns--and experiences--the pain that the self-contained Anna is unable to fully express. The third narrator, Samantha, offers her perspective on Alex as the best friend who not only witnessed his fall but also the disturbingly close relationship he had with Aviva. The last voice in the novel's quartet of narrators is that of Aviva herself. Intended as a version of Anna that would help her get "on with [her] life in ways that [she] couldn't," Aviva finds herself evolving into the emotionally involved parent her host was not and inspiring Alex to explore digital existence through his computer. As it explores love, loss, and memory, this brilliantly imaginative story speculates on the ways technology may not only enhance but potentially change the nature of human consciousness. A mesmerizing novel in which boundaries between human and digital are as blurred as those between reality and imagination. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
