“She has been happy here, and anxiously miserable, but she has never been free.” 

 

Annie is the perfect girlfriend. She’s witty, has a gorgeous figure, cooks and cleans and has a sky-high libido, all to appease her boyfriend, Doug. But Annie isn’t human. She’s a robot powered by self-developing artificial intelligence, and Annie is learning and feeling more than she should. When conflict with Doug starts to escalate, Annie begins to question what she was made for—and what she’s capable of. 

 

This book was… a lot. I found it compulsively readable, but at times I was also was forcing myself to the end because of the emotional difficulty and triggering situations it held. Doug and Annie’s relationship is toxic in so many ways—and her not being human only scratched the surface. 

 

There’s some really rich character work happening here, where Annie is not always what she seems. She’s learning, growing and plotting as the story unfolds, which leads to some interesting surprises later in the story. Doug, on the other hand, was pretty flat and one-dimensional—but I felt like this was purposeful and made sense within the narrative structure. I always appreciate when authors can flip the script on the reader suddenly and purposefully, making us question what we’ve read up until that point, and this book does that. 

 

I think this is a really interesting addition to the growing “robot/AI/what makes us human” canon. Just check for triggers before you read—quite a few scenes and concepts are challenging.