I don't know what happened, but Nancy Kress lost all craft for this book.

CONTENT WARNING:

Spoiler

sexual assault, sick child, loss of a child, cancer, loss of a partner, terrorism, mass shootings, social media attacks

Things that were great:

-The concept. How we live knowing that consciousness is just a sort of Descartes "I doubt (or I think) therefore I am" is very interesting.

-Cast of characters: Outside our legal framework and capitalism, these were cool characters to get to know.

-The world. I was super interested in exploring consciousness in the world of social media attacks in particular, it seemed like we'd go somewhere where shame was fabricated, which would have been very cool.

The rest:

-Bad writing. I'm sorry but there was no connective tissue, everything was surface level, telegraphed painfully, nothing led to something else, and it was overdone by at least 100 pages.

-Bad plotting. As an offshoot of my first point, the plot here was painfully spare and obvious.

-Dialogue. Also painful.

-We don't deal with the pain. There's a lot of big topics and we just do not feel the impact of them.

I'd tried Beggars in Spain and found it also not emotionally resonant. Unfortunately I just don't think this author has a style I can appreciate.