A well-paced page-turner with a sour ending.
Perfect wife, perfect life, right? Not so fast.
Delaney (Believe Me, 2018, etc.) returns with a domestic artificial-intelligence thriller. Five years after an accident, Abbie wakes up covered in bandages and surrounded by machines. The catch? This isn’t the real Abbie; this Abbie is a cobot, or “companion robot.” The real Abbie—a wild, beautiful artist and devoted mother—was never found. Her husband, Tim, a Steve Jobs type complete with God complex and anger issues, owns Scott Robotics, a cutting-edge Silicon Valley darling. Tim has spent half a decade and an enormous amount of resources to bring his wife back. The novel is told from the alternating perspectives of Abbie the cobot, who propels the novel forward, and Scott Robotics employees, who provide a Greek chorus of exposition. Cobot Abbie doesn’t just look like her namesake: She has her thoughts, memories, and voice; feels maternal toward Danny, her autistic son; and begins to learn the original Abbie's secrets. But she also is her own person—well, robot. The tension between the inherited and innate is portrayed nicely, and the ethical questions surrounding Abbie are interesting. If robots are capable of feelings, empathy, and pain, should they have the same rights as humans? If not, how should they be treated? There’s a particularly heartbreaking scene when cobot Abbie makes a bouillabaisse—without senses of taste or smell—and uses rotten fish bones. With shame and despair, Abbie thinks, “Your stock—your beautiful, elaborate, saffron-infused fumet—was poisoned from the start.” To add insult to injury: Artificial smelling technology exists but Tim has cut corners. A fitting metaphor. The twist—or, rather, twists—is genuinely surprising and quite disturbing, but it feels like a slap in the face by taking away what little agency had been given to the female characters.
A well-paced page-turner with a sour ending.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9674-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.
High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.
It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52142-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.
A good Samaritan incurs a psychopath’s wrath in this debut thriller.
Veterinarian Cassie Larkin is heading home after a 12-hour shift when someone darts in front of her car, causing her to dump her energy drink. As she pulls over to mop up the mess, her headlights illuminate a couple having a physical altercation. Cassie calls 911, but before help arrives, the man tosses the woman down an embankment. Ignoring the dispatcher’s instructions, Cassie exits the vehicle and intervenes, preventing the now-unconscious woman’s murder. With sirens wailing in the distance, the man warns Cassie: “Let her die, and I’ll let you live.” He then scrambles back to the road and flees in Cassie’s van. Using mug shots, Cassie identifies the thief and would-be killer as Carver Sweet, who is wanted for poisoning his wife. The Santa Rosa police assure Cassie of her safety, but the next evening, her husband, Sam, vanishes while trick-or-treating with their 6-year-old daughter, Audrey. Hours later, he sends texts apologizing and confessing to an affair, but although it’s true that Sam and Cassie have been fighting, she suspects foul play—particularly given the previous night’s events. Cassie files a report with the cops, but they dismiss her concerns, leaving Cassie to investigate on her own. After a convoluted start, Chavez embarks on a paranoia-fueled thrill ride, escalating the stakes while exploiting readers’ darkest domestic fears. The far-fetched plot lacks cohesion and relies too heavily on coincidence to be fully satisfying, but the reader will be invested in learning the Larkin family’s fate through to the too-pat conclusion.
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293617-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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