Thank you to the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. 

I've had a Premium Spotify account since 2017 (all hail the student account prices of the 2010s) and I've also been an advocate for Spotify after iTunes/Apple Music forced that U2 album on all of us that we still can't get rid of. However, Mood Machine unveils that not all is all sunshine and skittles behind the rise of Spotify. 

Make no mistake, this is a dense book of journalism. So much so that I decided to pick up the audiobook on Libby instead of continuing on in my ARC from the publisher. The author delves into the rise of Spotify in Sweden and its sweep over Europe before it jumped the pond into the US market. 

Spotify is not the perfect streamer company that many make it out to be. Musicians barely make money off of the platform and now Spotify is adding in AI music into playlists so that real musicians make even less money.

The new Spotify game seems to be using AI to undermine the consumer and the artists without any of us realizing it until now. 

May we see the fall of moms who exploit their children on social media. 

I swear on Mother that this was too long 

I enjoyed this book overall, but felt that there were so many plot points that it almost seemed like it didn’t know what it was.

A historical fiction?
A romance?
A mystery?

Adult or YA?

I think the summation of my thoughts is: underdeveloped. 

I loved the characters of James and Nye, plus their little crew and would’ve liked to see all of the above characters developed more.

Following James as he leaves his family behind in England to follow his dreams by any way necessary was an interesting way to be introduced to Burke and Hare in this story. I do wish the either of James’ medical schools would have been developed more too. 

I feel like the relationship of James and Nye was also underdeveloped and if the author wanted to use it as part of James’ coming of age, it could’ve been more. 

Huge thanks for William Morrow for this galley

I requested Death of the Author on a whim after hearing so many amazing things about Okorafor's previous books: the Binti trilogy, the Nsibidi Scripts Series, LaGuardia, and her most recent novella Remote Control. I was not disappointed at all. 

I did not go in with any expectations except for knowing that people love her character building and writing and they are right. 

Death of the Author is a science fiction novel with the perfect amount of literary fiction/disfunctional family mixed in. 

Zelu is the second oldest of a Nigerian family living in Chicago who had an accident at the age of twelve that left her a paraplegic. The story starts out when Zelu is around 30 years old and we follow her for over 10 years as she loses a job, deals with a family that wants to cushion her for safety, and as she publishes her first book. 

Okorafor splices in bits of the book that Zelu publishes in-between plot and interviews with Zelu's family. It was the perfect amount of a book-within-a-book for me. These splices make the book which is more of a contemporary or literary fiction have more of a speculative fiction feel as Zelu's novel centers around robots and AI set in Nigeria. 

To me, the center of this novel is what does humanity mean? Okorafor draws the line between humanity and automation as we follow both Zelu and her sci-fi novel. 

I would be remiss if I do not mention that Zelu is not the perfect character. There will be times where the reader does not like her, but more often than not you will be rooting for her as she tackles the boundaries around her that have been set by her family, tradition, and society. As she adds in automation to her life, her family just does not understand and she feels misunderstood. 

If I have one qualm on the book it's that the pacing is off at times when switching between following Zelu, going to her book, and going to an interview with a family member. 

This is a journey with themes of humanity, family, culture, grief, anxiety, depression, and the pressure to be as successful as your siblings. This is a journey I highly suggest you take on. 

Thank you to Atria for this copy in exchange for a review. 

I think I have a thing for romances that have a few different tropes in them and this one really worked for me. 

Both main characters are a bit grumpy in the beginning for certifiable reasons. Margot is an author who just got hacked by a reader that ended in something being exposed that was for her eyes only. Forrest is a doctor is helping run his father’s business while also being his caretaker in Alaska.

Both Margot and Forrest are iffy on life and are quick to judge each other from the start.

I ate this up pool side in a morning on vacation.

Thanks to the publisher for the eGalley, but the writing is too lyrical to keep my attention. 

Also  I wish that there was an intro page or something, maybe a prologue to detail how the world became what it did? The early descriptions are so confusing