AUTHOR: Veronica G. Henry
This was disappointing. I really wanted to love it. The premise is very appealing: a library where people can check out virtual recreations of historic individuals, or, as the blub says: "a digital collection of human consciousness." The protagonist is the head librarian of the People's Library, and that's where the novel's problems begin. Echo London is a bit of a cliche, someone more comfortable with books than people. She keeps herself closed off from others, including her colleagues. She has no real friends. Her life revolves around her job. Echo is boring.
Set in the near future, the story feels padded. There was a tech rebellion and then things got better but now the anti-tech movement is back, but we never see much of that part of the story because the book sticks with Echo, except for an info dump chapter near the end to fill in the back story of the antagonist. The prose is bland, with cliched descriptions, phrasing, metaphors, and similes. The plot revolves around Echo's growing attachment to the virtual people she checks out for conversations and most of the short chapters have a repetitive feeling, and by the end, it all feels so predictable. A Postlude serves as a caution that AI poses more of a threat than people think, but it reads like a lecture. A couple of ominous paragraphs would've better served the story.
I kept waiting for something interesting to happen, but it never did.
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