Haunting, delicate and thought-provoking, I found myself picking up and putting down this tale often, reading in short bursts, as the style of writing allows easily because I just felt the need to let what I was reading sink in and be able to slowly digest and mull over what I had read.

Wow this totally gripped me fron the first to the last page. What a read.

Thank you for the opportunity to review

5 stars

I would like to thank the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read and honestly review an advanced reader’s copy of this book.

I was almost put off by some of the early reviews on this. They were very mixed, some of them just terrible; and I almost skipped this. I am so glad I didn’t.

Imagine a sci fi story about grieving AI and environmental damage and how even the most ordinary people can influence each other lives in major ways.
Now imagine that story told to you only by an interconnecting web of obituaries. Just page after page of obituaries laying out snapshots of character’s lives, and telling a story just in the gaps of them.

I thought it was brilliant. I was never bored. The only pitfall is how many characters there are to keep track of. I benefitted from reading this on my kindle, where I could just highlight a name and search it to remind myself who they were.

If you love your sci fi weird and meaningful, you should try this. I suspect it won’t be for everyone, but it was very much for me.

The blurb for this sounds so promising, an exploration of grief through obituaries and a possibly sentient AI coming to grips with the loss it their daughter all set against the backdrop of a dystopian hellscape? This is an incredible premise let down by its execution.

<b>What didn't work for me:</b>
👎 The attempt at an <b>epistolary format</b>: this style usually works for me but this didn’t have enough variance in medium. There were news articles, obituaries, transmission logs, dictionary excerpts... and they all sounded identical. None of the mediums felt authentic in their own rite and they all had the same dry, dull style as each other. The <b>obituaries</b> were the worst offenders for unconvincing style: they were too detailed, had too much dialogue and only focused on a small section of the human's life. They didn't feel authentically like obituaries, more like an interview about a specific thing.

👎 The <b>dialogue and characterization</b> was all the same. Nothing set the characters apart at all. Even if we look past how much of the dialogue clogged up obituaries, all the characters had the same voice... which I personally didn't care for. Was it because it thought it was cleverer than it was? Maybe. But I wasn't buying any of the dialogue or attempts at characterization. Similarly, the <b>writing style</b> didn't work for me for similar reasons. I think this reader might need a bit more coherence from the storyline, a more diverse voices across characters, and some emotion or hook to keep me reading. This felt like reading the same periodical over and over again in different font styles.

👎 There was a lot of focus on art and celebrity culture. While neither of these topics interest me, the author didn't even try to make them interesting or bring people who weren't into either along for the ride. I recently read a book about pottery (another medium of art I have zero interest in) and found myself immersed in the methods and practice simply due to the author's enthusiasm. This book had none of that.

👎 Once I passed the halfway point in the book, I had to start skimming because it was just so <I>boring</I>. There wasn't any emotion at any point and the end message was basically 'welp, we all die so 🤷‍♀️'. This book didn't have anything to say about, well, anything and reading it was a dry, boring, and frustrating experience. Instead of exploring grief, it almost seemed to make light of it.

I didn't have a good time with this book.

I was privileged to have my request to read this book accepted through NetGalley. Thanks for letting me give it a try, Sourcebooks UK.