What makes us human? What is memory? What is the difference between the human mind and Artificial Intelligence? Interesting questions to raise as we be come more and more dependent on Siri (and the like) to manage our lives or our devices to keep the pictures that form our memories!

In this tender and touching novel, Hall explores the complexities of connection and the ways we use, create and interact with memories. Her characters span time and geography allowing us to see the incremental shifts that have occurred, are occurring and could possibly occur in the future as the inexorable development of AI continues. This is not a polemic against AI, but rather a subtle questioning of what differentiates humanity from our creations and a recognition that human connections are often fraught with resistance, and barriers.

The novel is told from several different perspectives beginning with the diary of a young girl named Mary, who is crossing the Atlantic to be married when she does not wish to do so. Next, a young Alan Turing, the man who went on to solve the Enigma code, is revealed in letters he writes to the mother of his best friend who committed suicide and a computer scientist bemoans his lack of connection with his wife and the growing silence that has come between them over his repeated rejection of her efforts to create memory in the AI platform they have been working on. Some years in the future an isolated and traumatized young girl reaches out to talk with an intelligent software program and finally we hear the confession of a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created illegal lifelike dolls which when recalled led to a new form of massive psychological trauma and dysfunction in the children who owned them.

Hall’s diversity of characters, the many ways that they choose to express themselves, and their intertwined lives, opens up the basic questions of what it means to be human in new ways.  Hall’s characters are vibrant and well articulated and each adds something new to our understanding. The questions that she raises never dominate but rather work subtly in the background, nudging us to be asked. Powerful, yet understated this was a book that kept haunting me with its unanswerable yet provocative questions.

Brenda” Rating: ****(4 out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Keith, Marian and Sharon

Book Study Worthy: Yes!

Read in ebook format.