This story of a girl unraveling the mystery of her father's life, as he loses his battle with Alzheimer's, felt so real and raw, almost like a memoir. The cast of characters were wonderfully idiosyncratic and I loved them all. It was also a compelling coming of age story, with some astute gems like this one on teen girls:
"Ada could barely keep up with their swinging, shifting moods. They seemed to her like birds in flight, like starlings, changing direction with such collective unspoken force that it seemed as if they shared a central root system, a pine barren jointed together and invisibly beneath the earth."
The jumping back and forth in time to reveal plot points could be jarring for some, but I thought this created the perfect level of suspense. I also loved the way the author employed characters imbued in the science of AI to tell a story of what makes us human.
"sometimes, in her bed at night, Ada pondered the idea that she, in fact, was a machine --or that all humans were machines programmed in utero by their DNA, the human body a sort of hardware that possessed within it preloaded, self-executing software. And what, she wondered, did they say about the nature of existence? And what did it say about predestination? Fate? God?"
Sometimes it got a little long in the tooth, but overall, it was a haunting and memorable novel with one of the best epilogues I've ever read.
(For more reviews and bookish musings: http://www.bornandreadinchicago.com/)