Thank you to William Morrow for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own. 

I seem to be on a tear when it comes to reading dark AI stories. But here we are…

After a disastrous chatbot as a newsletter deployment in a non-profit our main character, Octavia is on the hunt for a new job. She lands an interview and role at one of the biggest auditory tech companies on the planet. After she aces a scoring algorithm, that is. And by ace, I mean she brute force cracks it by acting like an overcompensating white man. Gee, who knew unchecked and unethical tech could all go so wrong. (Me. I knew.)

This entire novel is told in second person. It was jarring at first but I found myself immersed quickly and didn’t notice it. It’s clear the issues with tech companies, data collection, and AI are the main threads here and you can tell the author spent time as a minority in tech. The scars run deep. It has some deep philosophical moments that had me examining my own career and impact. And I learned a lot about contributions from Black innovators and writers that I didn’t know or only knew the whitewashed version of, which was pretty cool. It’s often eloquent and beautiful as Octavia struggles with grief after losing both her parents and her own sense of self. 

But. And there is a but. It’s strangely slow for being as short as it is. At the 50% mark it felt like we were getting to the wrap up and I had to double check my progress. The pacing is a little off, it felt drawn out and clunky in places it should have been picking up. The interaction with the blind old man towards the end felt out of place. Honestly, you could lose that entire interaction and still not lose anything in the narrative. And the last chapter I have serious mixed feelings about. The concept is solid but I would have loved more breadcrumbs throughout. I guessed the “twist” easily but I can’t say that is for everyone as my background as a woman in tech is a walking spoiler here. 

This is more of a nitpick than anything else. For whatever reason being this is about a big tech company dealing with DEI issues has absolutely zero mentions of any South Asian representation. CJ Farley primarily focuses on Black and white, with one fairly minor Asian character. This feels like a huge miss when discussing race in a tech environment, but again this could have been sticking with their own direct experiences vs trying to be inclusive of all PoCs in tech. 

Overall, it’s a solid read and I enjoyed it. Octavia made some dumb choices, owned up to them, made more trying to make it right. The frankness in how CJ Farley writes her feels authentic and real. I’d be interested in reading more from this author in the future.