UnWorld
Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf publishing for the digital review copy of this title. This one hit shelves on June 17th.
This was strange and beautiful and left me feeling like I might have overlooked something. I immediately thought I should probably start it over again to dig at its true meaning, and the thing is, I actually would do it. Sometimes I walk away from a book feeling like it went over my head or I was missing something and I’m just frustrated or angry. Not so with UnWorld. I could see myself reading it a second or third time and appreciating it more with each encounter.
The novel explores the death of Alex, a 16-year-old boy, through the lens of other characters: Anna (his mother), Samantha (his best friend), and Aviva (his mother’s AI upload; part of her consciousness and memory bank). The book includes a human-like Artificial Intelligence, similar to Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, but I didn’t feel like this one was really about AI. It was more about what it means to grieve, what it means to be human, and how it feels to be a human stuck in a brain full of intrusive thoughts and meandering pathways (as Alex’s mindset is revealed in Sam’s chapter).
There was emotional depth to this fiction debut and a clear understanding of prolonged grief. I’ve got the author’s memoir on my radar now and am certain it will hit the right notes as this one did.
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This contains descriptions of suicide and suicidal ideation.
