I am a fan of Liz Moore. Her prose is lovely and she sees people warts and all with a compassionate eye. Mostly I was a fan of this, but not entirely. I loved the first part of this book. Ada is lovely and fascinating but has no one to help guide her and no one who lets her be a child. The second half becomes a mystery, and though I liked where Moore went with it I thought that story needed fleshing out -- we just don't get to know the player. Also, it felt like I reading two different books that differed in tone, and I think there was a second book here. The first book is just about complete. If Moore had added even a chapter fleshing out a few things about Ada's college and early professional years it would have been perfect. The second book was half-written, but the half was good. And the transition from part one (Ada's story) to part two (David's hidden past) felt like whiplash. Some stuff gets knitted together at the end so the conclusion was mostly satisfying, but there were easily 100 pages of this that belonged in a different book. (Since I complain when books make up things about tech I will give props here. I was so happy to have a writer who understands how machine learning works write an ending that depends upon it. That is a rare event in fiction.) ( )

NOTE: the librarian requested two books be inventoried.

NOTE: The Librarian requested two books be inventoried.

That went in a direction that I was really not expecting. Beautifully written, the characters were alive while I was reading this, you could almost hear them in the room with you. ( )

I started on kindle and finished on audio. Really enjoyed the creativity and thin space between the seen and unseen world. Great themes of belonging, technology, coming of age... ( )