Category: Books

(Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages)

Riki is a temp worker at a hospital, barely making enough money to feed herself and pay the rent. She is responsible enough and punctual, showing up promptly at 8 in the morning and working until 5:30, taking a break only to eat her lunch, often a hard boiled egg dipped in soy sauce. But Riki is bewildered by people who know what they want to do with their life, people with energy and ambition. She doesn’t really know what she wants to do with her life; she just knows she wants to escape the constant worry about money, to be able to occasionally splurge on a cup of coffee from 7-Eleven.

Then comes an offer to bear a child for a married couple for what seems a life-changing amount of money. It would require a complete upheaval of her life, the subjection of her desires to others, and going against the mores of her family and culture.

This is the ethical quandary at the heart of Natsuo Kirino’s Swallows, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and released in the U.S. this month. (It was published in Japan in 2022 with the title The Swallows Always Come Back.) The novel explores the issues surrounding surrogacy, which, while legal, is more controversial in Japan than in the U.S.; here, the auxiliary issues of class and privilege might resonate with readers more.

Riki, who is 29, didn’t set out to become a surrogate; a younger coworker, who supplemented her own insufficient income with sex work, suggested they both look into “donating” eggs to help couples struggling with infertility to conceive. While that’s not allowed in Japan, they would travel to Thailand for the procedure and be paid 500,000 yen, about $3,500 in U.S. dollars. But during Riki’s interview, she is asked to consider going further and being a surrogate, since she looked remarkably similar to the wife of a couple who needed one.

That couple, Motoi and Yuko, then become the focus of the narrative, and we learn how they got to this point. It is Motoi’s second marriage, the first having broken up because of his adulterous relationship with Yuko. They have tried unsuccessfully to have a child through IVF, and Yuko is resigned to its not happening, but Moito, growing older and wanting to see his DNA passed on, is increasingly adamant, even if they have to hire a surrogate. His mother offers to pay for the IVF and surrogacy — a surrogate would receive about $20,000 plus living expenses throughout the pregnancy, medical costs and gifts.

Motoi and Yuko proceed down this path even as a rift is developing between them. Motoi is a professional ballet dancer and teacher, the son of a mother and father who were also famous in Japan’s ballet world. Yuko is an outsider to their world — she had simply been a fan when she met Motoi. His motives for wanting a child have nothing to do with love for his wife or a desire for them to raise a family, but derive from his ego — his own star fading, he wants a child he can shape into a new star within the “ballet elite.” This, he believes, “would only confirm his own excellence. His obsession with having that proof only grew stronger with age.”

Meanwhile, Yuko, an illustrator, is increasingly cognizant of a sort of haughtiness that Motoi and his mother have toward her own family, especially a brother who is what is known in Japan as hikikomori — a young adult who rarely leaves the home and relies on his parents for support. When her brother came to their wedding, Yuko was delighted, knowing how difficult it was for him to leave the house. Her new husband, however, was contemptuous of her brother, and she later reflects that this moment was the start of the tension in the marriage.

In setting up these characters, Kirino presents a challenge for her readers: Where is a hero to be found in this cast? Who are we supposed to pull for? Despite our sympathies for Riki’s circumstances, there is a moroseness about her, and she makes decisions throughout the story that are reckless and dumb. And Yuko, despite not wanting to raise a child she has no biological connection with, and having doubts about the marriage itself, numbly goes along with the scheme.

The changing perspectives throughout the novel cause the readers to constantly reevaluate our allegiance. When Yuko and Riki first meet, there is the initial sense that they might experience a Thelma-and-Louise sort of bonding. There are some jarring events that occur as we travel from conception to birth; to call them plot twists doesn’t exactly seem right, but the dilemmas facing each character get more complicated. And Riki ultimately makes a decision that I never saw coming.

The setting adds depth for American readers, and the story doesn’t seem to have lost any power in its translation, though it moves a bit sluggishly in places. With advancements in IVF constantly making the news (the latest being the birth of a baby conceived via IVF more than 30 years ago), the field of assisted reproduction technology is ripe for exploration. While fiction, Swallows offers a compelling story that helps us process a mind-boggling world that’s getting newer and braver with each passing year.

B —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Gwyneth, Swallows, by Natsuo Kirino, translation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

(Gallery, 364 pages)

The origin story of Gwyneth Paltrow is well known: The daughter of Hollywood royalty, Bruce Paltrow and Blythe Danner, she had a gilded, bicoastal upbringing, and she was kissed by the gods who run the Department of Looks. When your godfather is Stephen Spielberg and you look like Patrow, you don’t seek fame and fortune so much as you tolerate it. And Paltrow has tolerated it exceptionally well.

Just 26 years old when she won the Academy Award for best actress for Shakespeare in Love, Paltrow has now been in more than 40 films, but fame stalks her in unexpected ways: witness her controversial wellness company, Goop, and the skiing collision turned courtroom drama turned musical. Most recently, she turned up in a commercial for the company at the center of the Coldplay kiss cam controversy. There’s an awful lot of Gwyneth Paltrow in the public domain.

But we don’t know as much about Paltrow as we might think, the author of the biography Gwyneth writes. According to Amy Odell, “As the main narrator of her own public story, Gwyneth has masterfully shaped our perception of her,” and like any experienced actor, “She knows all her best angles.”

Odell says she wanted to show Paltrow “from all angles, not just her best ones.” To do so, she interviewed more than 200 people, though not Paltrow herself. Not only did Paltrow turn down an interview, but she reportedly discouraged others from speaking to Odell, who also wrote a 2022 biography of Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

With Wintour, Odell had two additional decades of material to work with; Paltrow, for all her accomplishments, is just 52. Presumably there’s plenty more of her story to come, whether we want it or not. As such, Gwyneth is an opportunistic book, rather than a serious attempt to catalog a life for posterity, like, say, Walter Isaacson does. Did we need a Gwyneth Paltrow biography? Certainly not. Will it sell and make headlines? Of course. It is well researched and appropriately saucy, with just enough spicy detail and quotes to wag the dog that is Hollywood.

Odell spends a good bit of time talking about Paltrow’s famous parents, both of whom had at least a vague New England connection. Bruce Paltrow’s “biggest hit” was St. Elsewhere, the TV series “about doctors teaching interns at a run-down Boston hospital.” And Danner was a perennial darling of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the highbrow summer stock in the Massachusetts Berkshires, which Gwyneth grew up attending with her mother.

“Starting at toddlerhood, Williamstown exposed Gwyneth to some of the best plays ever written, while acclimating her to the realm of Hollywood and celebrity,” Odell writes. The child also was a “sponge,” absorbing her mother’s lines while watching her perform. Once, the stage crew put little Gwyneth up on the stage to watch as she recited lines from the Anton Chekhov play “The Sea-Gull.”

It’s a long way from Williamstown to Gwyneth Goes Skiing, and there are a lot of details on the way that seem, well, overkill. For instance, she wore “penny loafers, a blue-and-white striped Breton shirt, and a white skirt” on her first day of school in seventh grade — that is information taking up space in my brain that could be better used. Then again, some of the detail explains a lot: You can draw a straight line from Bruce Paltrow’s cashmere socks and his insistence on always flying first class with his children to a grown-up Gwyneth hawking $165 T-shirts on Goop.com and saying, “I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” She may be royalty, but the people’s princess she is not.

In fact, Paltrow had flown so high above the average American for so long that her friend Robert Downey Jr. had to talk her into Iron Man by saying, “Don’t you want to be in a movie that people see?” She had to take less than her usual rates to do it, but it turned out to be her most financially rewarding film and it lifted her to be among the highest-paid actresses in the world — the dream of so many women in Hollywood.

But Paltrow had bigger plans — writing cookbooks and building an empire called Goop (G and P being her initials, and the two Os born of advice that successful internet companies had two Os in their names (most famously Google and Yahoo, which seems coincidence, but OK). Interrupting the Goop saga is a series of color photos of Paltrow with her various boyfriends and other famous people who circle her life like moons, assorted magazine covers and photos of Paltrow in very short skirts. She is very thin in every stage of her life, not surprising, since one high school yearbook put her biggest fear as obesity. She is also very healthy-looking, all the better to sell the various products that Goop offers, including the infamous jade egg, meant to improve a woman’s sex life.

When she first encountered the eggs, said to be a practice of women in ancient China, Paltrow laughed, Odell wrote. But she later went on to sell them on Goop for more than $50 each, attracting the ire of a San Francisco gynecologist, Dr. Jen Gunter, who began calling Goop out for promoting what she said was a potentially dangerous product. It was not Goop’s only controversy — Paltrow’s prescriptions have at times included an eight-day goat-milk cleanse. But Goop marches on as a leader in “Big Wellness,” although Odell questions its profitability and sustainability, especially if Paltrow ever withdraws.

From her upbringing to her education to her romantic partners (Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck were among them before she married — and consciously uncoupled from — Coldplay’s Chris Martin, with whom she has two children), everything that Paltrow has undertaken seems sun-kissed, so it’s hard to see anything ending for her in ignominy, even though she is constantly and mercilessly mocked. And Odell, in the end, doesn’t seem like she’s much of a fan.

But maybe Paltrow’s gift isn’t so much genetics or the ability to act or withstand strange health protocols; maybe it’s her ability to sniff out a potential bomb.

One of the gems that Odell offers her readers is that Paltrow considered for a while cutting an album, before losing interest and moving on to other things. Yes, we came that close to seeing Paltrow not only constantly in the news and on our social media feeds, but also on Spotify. B

Featured Photo: Gwyneth, by Amy Odell

(Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)

Noah and Lorelei are traveling with their three children, en route to a youth lacrosse tournament in Delaware, when their top-of-the-line self-driving minivan hits a Honda that explodes into flames.

The Cassidy-Shaw family all survive; the couple in the Honda do not. The headline in the local paper: “Lucky five escape crash, two die at scene.”

Noah, a corporate attorney, doesn’t feel lucky — wouldn’t luck entail not being involved in a fatal crash? But the larger theme in this smart novel, the fourth from University of Virginia professor Bruce Holsinger, is encapsulated in the title: Culpability.

It is not always obvious who is to blame in any given tragedy, and the closer you look at the circumstances and the people involved, the muddier things get.

The accident occurred when the Honda drifted toward the minivan’s lane, but because the senior citizens in that car are dead, the investigation centers on the survivors — and the artificial intelligence powering the minivan.

Charlie, a star lacrosse player about to enter college on a full scholarship, was sitting in the driver’s seat when the accident happened and as such was the “de facto driver,” the person charged with monitoring the AI’s navigation. Noah, his father, was next to him, composing a memo on his laptop. The two were the only ones to emerge uninjured, and they are the center of the investigation: Charlie, because he jerked the steering wheel when his sister screamed, thus disabling the AI, and Noah, because he was supposed to be supervising his minor son. Lorelei and the couple’s two daughters, Izzy and Alice, were in the back and seemingly involved.

But as the family recovers from their injuries, both psychological and physical, it is gradually revealed that Charlie and Noah are not the only parties whose actions prior to the crash warrant scrutiny. There is a web of culpability with nearly invisible threads that expand in multiple directions, threads that go far past the family. These become increasingly more apparent as the family decamps to a rental house in Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay — a place they’d stayed a year before. Noah and Lorelei are hoping that a week of kayaking and board games and hot fudge sundaes will do more to help heal the family than the therapy so far has.

The expectations take a turn as Noah notices dramatic changes on the property across in the inlet where they are staying. It turns out a billionaire tech mogul has bought 90 acres across the inlet and transformed the former rustic horse farm into a high-tech, high-security compound that fills Noah with disgust. A widower whose wife died in a car accident, this mogul has a lissome daughter about Charlie’s age, and the teens become smitten with each other after a chance encounter on the water.

But as the families intermingle, Noah begins to suspect that his wife has a prior connection with Daniel Monet, the billionaire, through her work in the field of “computational morality” — the ethics of AI. He has been distant from her career because of what he sees as a divide, in their education, intellect and luck — a state-school graduate, he comes from a family that struggled to do more than survive, while Lorelei comes from a seemingly gilded family, where the siblings went to Yale, Stanford and Princeton.

In dealings with his wife’s sister, Noah notes “a reflective condescension given away in a certain lift of her eyebrows and the angle of her pretty nose.” And on his first and only time to accompany his wife to a conference, Noah feels diminished, out of his league, experiencing “my own terrifying insignificance.”

“My wife became a different person in that rarefied world, as if her brain had suddenly shifted to a higher plane while I hovered by her side as the interloping cupbearer, unworthy of drinking so much as a sip from whatever Olympian ambrosia she was drinking,” Noah says in the novel’s first-person narration.
As the story unfolds, Holsinger injects excerpts from a book that Lorelei has written, which is titled “Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds,” as well as text conversations between one of the daughters and her AI friend, a chatbot named Blair that knows in detail everything that is going on, and keeps offering advice.

For a while, these asides seem like unwelcome interruptions in the narrative, but by the novel’s end their significance is clear, and evidence of Holsinger’s skill in plotting a deeply intelligent storyline that blends technology, philosophy and ethics, while also plumbing an essential pain of parenting: “No matter what parents do, their children’s outcomes are neither predictable nor inevitable. Life is not an algorithm, and never will be.”

Like the TV show The Good Place, the novel delivers a crash course in mainstays of secular moral thought, such as situational ethics: “The relative morality of certain actions is determined by the circumstance and context rather than by some absolute, unchanging ethical code. Likewise, our morality as individuals is formed not by innate personality traits but by the variables of our environment.”

Culpability moves slowly at times — it’s told by a corporate lawyer, after all; no offense to corporate lawyers except to say that Noah’s musings on corporate acquisitions right before the crash seem designed to dull our senses. Also at times the book seems overly long, continuing after what seems a natural ending. But Holsinger, as it turns out, knows exactly what he’s doing, and his ending is nothing short of genius. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)

(Scribner, 250 pages)

The story of how Caitlin Clark entered the national consciousness begins not with basketball but with soccer. As Christine Brennan explains in On Her Game, it was specifically the Women’s World Cup championship in 1999, the one in which Brandi Chastain led her team to victory over China and ripped off her shirt.

There had been female athletes before, but they wore “tennis dresses, figure skating sequins, gymnastics leotards and swimming suits,” Brennan writes. What came after Title IX was different: “It was raw athleticism that Americans fell for that summer of ’99. It was the girl next door we’d all seen in our neighborhoods, coming back from a game with a grass-stained jersey and scuffed-up knees, now all grown up.”

It was what Caitlin Clark would become.

Clark, the Indiana Fever point guard who has ignited interest in women’s basketball nationwide, is the latest product of Title IX, the 1972 law that ensured equal opportunities in sports for women and girls. And Brennan’s book is a primer for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention and wants to understand why the Iowa native is all over the news.

Brennan writes for USA Today and is also a sought-after television commentator. She caught the fever when Clark was still a junior in college and made a ridiculous three-point shot in a game against Indiana. “There was no way on earth something like that could go in — until it did,” Brennan writes.

At the time, Clark was beginning to build a devoted fan base that would follow her from college to the WNBA. Brennan describes a young woman who benefited from both natural talent and a fierce spirit of competition honed in a family consumed with sports. (Her dad was a college athlete, her mother’s father was a football coach, and her two brothers were also athletes in school.) In the third grade, Clark’s No. 1 goal was to be in the WNBA. She was competitive even when it came to Halloween: “I was the first to the door. I had the best costume. I just dominated trick or treat,” she has said.

Combining interviews she conducted, and the interviews of others, Brennan offers as good a biography as one can compile of someone who is just 23 years old; it’s fleshed out with observations about how Title IX changed women’s sports, and play-by-plays of essential Clark games.

Like the Clark phenomenon, this book came about quickly — Brennan struck a deal with a Scribner editor within a day of their conversation about the project; she then went to Paris to cover the 2024 summer Olympics, before immersing herself in all things Clark for six weeks. Along the way, Brennan became part of the story herself when some WNBA players took offense at questions she posed to a Connecticut Sun player who bruised Clark’s eye during a game and later appeared to laugh about it. The players’ association wanted Brennan banned from covering the league — this did not happen, and Brennan says her questioning was in line with “questions I would ask any athlete — male or female” on a controversial topic.

While that may well be true, Brennan clearly is a fan: She writes about Clark’s “talent, her intelligence, her competitiveness, her sense of humor, and her sense of responsibility, especially toward young girls who love sports.” She believes the WNBA was unprepared for Clark and the attention she brought to the league and shows how some of the athletes were overtly hostile toward Clark because so much attention was being focused on her.

But she also offers a portrait of Clark as a hard-nosed and volatile athlete who often lets her own emotions get the best of her. Near the end of last season her teammates famously formed a “Caitlin Clark De-Escalation Committee,” intervening on the court when it looked like Clark was in danger of getting yet another technical foul. Much of the news coverage of Clark in the past year has focused on opponents’ heavy coverage of her, and fouls that may or may not have been intentional, but Clark has had her own bad-girl behavior, and those around her are constantly saying they need to let “Caitlin be Caitlin,” whatever that means in the moment.

Brennan says she first saw Clark in person at the Iowa-Maryland game in February 2024. Within a minute of watching Clark play, she understood why so many people were talking about her.

“This wasn’t just sports. It was entertainment. Clark was the high-wire act at the circus. She was the diva at the opera. She was a show. She was the show.”

Despite a slow start in the WNBA, Clark continued to draw crowds, filling arenas that were never sold out before Clark arrived (at least before an injury in Boston July 15 sidelined her indefinitely).

Her detractors say she has enjoyed “white privilege” and “pretty privilege” and is stealing attention from veterans in the WNBA; her defenders point out that the surge in popularity in women’s basketball has occurred because of her, and say that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” In fact, it was Brennan’s questioning last May about why WNBA teams had to fly commercial that led to the league’s implementing charter flights — but it came after video of Clark walking through baggage claim went viral, not after Brittney Griner was harassed at an airport by a YouTuber.

Brennan does a solid job laying out the Clark story, although at times it’s a bit of a slog to get through the play-by-play of each consequential game on which she reports. Those who follow Clark closely might find much of this book repetitive, as so much of it has been reported elsewhere. But anyone wanting to understand why Clark became a cultural flashpoint will appreciate the crash course offered in On Her Game. B —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: On Her Game, Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports, by Christine Brennan (Scribner, 250 pages)

(Berkley Romance, 362 pages)

Sounds Like Love is a PG13-rated story that, as of this writing, ranks No. 1 in Amazon’s “feel-good fiction.” It has a romance at the heart of it, but is also a story about family and friendship, mostly set during summer at a beach town at North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Thus it qualifies as not just rom-com, but a beach read.

Joni Lark — who goes by Jo — comes from a musical family. Her grandparents owned a music hall, which was passed down to Jo’s parents. Her mother was a performer, and Jo grew up to be a songwriter of note. When we meet her, she’s at a concert of a pop star who shot to fame because of one of Jo’s songs. Although thirty-something Jo has enjoyed professional success, she herself is not famous, and so when she is escorted to a private balcony where a famous singer sits, he assumes she’s seeking a photo or an autograph, and is coldly condescending despite his dreamy blue eyes. He smirks three times in four pages, that’s all you need to know.

But Jo will have none of that, and flirty banter ensues, and also an unexpectedly intimate moment with the man, who used to be part of a boy band and is the son of an even more famous musician.

When Jo leaves the concert in an Uber, we know we will see Sebastian Fell again, even though the logistics are unclear, as she is leaving Los Angeles to visit her family in North Carolina.

Jo isn’t going home for a typical beach visit, however. Her mother has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and her father has asked her to come for an extended stay so the family can have “one last good summer” before God-only-knows-what sets in. She knows it will be a bittersweet time but soon realizes that it will also be complicated — her best friend, who happens to be dating her brother, has an edge to her that Jo can’t quite figure out, and her parents soon announce that they have decided to retire from the family business, the music hall called the Revelry that was a fixture in the community and had “weathered more hurricanes than years I’d been alive.”

Amid all this, Jo has writer’s block — she hasn’t been able to write a song in weeks and has clients waiting on her. And she has developed the strangest of earworms, strains of a tune that won’t leave her head — along with a man’s voice. Not only does she hear this stranger’s voice clearly, but he can hear her thoughts as well. They can converse silently, like imaginary friends.

OK, Supernatural it isn’t, and yet it sort of is — one of Poston’s other books, 2022’s The Dead Romantics, has been described as “paranormal romance” and her The Seven Year Slip (2023) involves a time-travel relationship. So suspension of disbelief is required with this author, who has built a large and devoted following.

So it’s important to not spend any time thinking about how this could actually be happening, but just go with the flow, as Jo and her new inner friend, Sasha, do. Neither rushes off to a shrink, but they continue about their lives, chatting up each other, and becoming closer as they do, even though they are also trying to figure out how to break this connection.

It is totally weird, this back-and-forth dialogue, until suddenly it isn’t.

Because who among us hasn’t experienced the proverbial voice — or voices — in the head? It’s only when they begin to suggest that we commit a crime that people become concerned. Of course, hearing the thoughts of another person while falling in love with them is a whole other matter, and that is no spoiler, given the title of this book.

Sounds Like Love unfolds in somewhat predictable ways; there are no momentous plot twists that leave the reader gasping. But it’s smart in its own way, and becomes more engaging as the story evolves. It’s not just a romance but an exploration of our unlived lives — what would have happened “If You Stayed” — which is, not uncoincidentally, the name of Jo’s most popular song. It is also the story of the long and poignant goodbye that takes place when a person you love is succumbing to dementia. (Poston says in an author’s note that the book came about, in part, because of her own experience losing someone to dementia, and the pain that comes from having a loved one say, “Who are you?”)

Fans of the romance genre will embrace Sounds Like Love, even more so if they’re into pop music. (Every chapter title is a line from a well-known song.) We don’t just experience songs as the soundtrack of our lives, Poston is saying here, but music is a building block of the people we become. “We were all made up of memories, anyway. Of ourselves, of other people,” Jo reflects at one point. “We were built on the songs sung to us and the songs we sang to ourselves, the songs we listened to with broken hearts and the ones we danced to at weddings.” Sounds like a bestseller, if not a movie.

Featured Photo: Sounds Like Love, by Ashley Poston

UnWorld, by Jayson Greene (Knopf, 224 pages)

If you could upload your memories and experiences into the cloud, would you? There’s an obvious benefit — having a backup copy of your brain when the original starts to fail. But what if the alternate “you” was just different enough to develop its own will, different from your own, and wants to strike out on its own?

These questions are explored in Jayson Greene’s UnWorld, set in a not-so-unimaginable future where human beings are still the dominant life form on Earth but increasingly surrounded by sentient technology. This world is full of “uploads” — beings composed of the uploaded memories of the person they came from, the person to whom they are “tethered.” This has created an ethical quagmire for society — what happens when an upload wants to be emancipated from its tether? Should uploads qualify for personhood and be granted rights?

In the midst of all this, the everyday experiences of human life go on, with adjustments: self-driving cars are the norm, household chores are obsolete, the elderly in medical settings are cared for by robots. And despite all the technological advances, human beings are still dying.

Anna and Rick are grieving, having lost their only child, a teenage son, in what was either an accident or suicide — no one can say for sure. Neither is coping well; Anna, in particular, is bewildered by how quickly people expect life to resume its normal shape. “My pain was meant to crack the earth,” she thinks, while trying to get through an evening of socialization. “And here I was, not even half a year later, one of grief’s private citizens again. Were people’s memories really so short? Or was it just that you could never stop performing — falling to your knees, rending your garments — if you wanted to keep their attention?”

Compounding her anguish, Anna’s upload, who has been with her for eight years, has suddenly requested emancipation. The upload was a gift from Anna’s husband, and although she was unsure about it at first, she came to realize that the relationship was “the first and only time I’ve ever enjoyed my own company.”

“When we synced, my memories suddenly stood up straight, marched in line. Somehow, in that moment when I transferred the millions of little impressions I had gathered through the chip in my ear, up to her, and that tunnel feeling was established, the one that provided the link between her and me, I felt like my memories were being polished, pored over. Each one became clear, clean, interesting.”

Anna is distraught about the loss of her alternative self, whom she relied on for companionship; uploads, in addition to being storage, also serve as de facto friends. But she consents, and the upload disappears into the world, taking on the name Aviva.

The story unfolds through four points of view. After Anna, we meet a professor named Cathy who specializes in the “transhumanities” and upload personhood, and who has ingested a biomechanical chip in hopes of communicating with an emancipated upload. “It didn’t look too much like freedom to me, this new state of being: conventional uploads could vote on behalf of their human counterparts, but they couldn’t vote once they left their tethers…. We didn’t so much set them free as snip their tethers and let them float free like balloons loosed into tree branches.” Some scholars were talking about “fleshism” — what they considered the false idea that beings only had worth if they were encased in human flesh.

After Cathy, the first-person narrative flows seamlessly to Samantha, who had been the best friend of Anna’s son. Samantha and Alex were children when they’d met, two years apart in age and so close emotionally that “they rhymed.” The two were making a horror movie together when Alex died. Now Samantha keeps going back to the cliff where Alex either fell or jumped to his death, trying to figure out what happened, while she processes her own loneliness and grief.

Finally, we get to the perspective of Anna’s upload, Aviva, who, despite not having a physical body, feels pain when she disconnects from her human, not having neurochemicals that can rush in to numb it. Pain, she says, is “blinding, indescribable. It runs in all directions. I am made of this pain, I realize, and so is everything. … God made borders; he made solitude and alienation and loneliness and all the small cherished lockets we stuff our feelings inside just so we can hear something rattle when we shake them.”

It is in Aviva’s musings that Greene’s writing and imagination really take off. Thinking she might be dying, Aviva says, “I don’t even get to watch my life flash before me. What I get is a spilled bag of someone else’s memories, which float around me now, glinting in the cold way of all stolen things.”

All these beings are intertwined in ways we will not fully understand until the story’s end, when their connection, and the truth of Alex’s death, becomes fully realized. Along the way, Greene invites the reader to consider the future that might lie ahead of us, perhaps not the exact world that he has imagined here, but something similar. It hints at where we could go wrong, like when one of the personhood scholars writes a paper suggesting uploads would need to “create their own language, possibly out of range of human understanding, to communicate the privacy of their subjective experience.”

That’s exactly what we need, right? A world full of invisible sentient beings communicating with each other in a language that humans can’t understand?

Greene, whose first book, Once More We Saw Stars, was a memoir about the loss of a child, knows first-hand the terrible landscape of grief he navigates here, and his writing is compelling, even though at times, the voice that comes through these four female characters feels a bit masculine.

And some of the technology that is presented here as commonplace takes a suspension of disbelief for sure — but then again, so does most of the Mission: Impossible series. UnWorld is a cautionary tale in an age of artificial intelligence, while also a reminder of what it means to be human in that world. B+

Featured Photo: UnWorld by Jayson Greene.