Laura

I absolutely adore this book! Novellas are a hit or miss for me because it's so easy to include not enough or too much information but Olivia Waite was brilliant with balancing out the details! She sprinkled in just enough information about their society and tech for us to understand and all the characters were highly fascinating. This is truly a cozy queer scifi mystery that I thoroughly enjoyed and I'm so excited to read Book 2!

Thank you to Tordotcom for an ARC and getting us in contact with Olivia Waite for a Shit We've Read podcast interview!

3.5 🌟

I love scifi books featuring AI so this book's synopsis hooked me. Upon reading, I was fascinated by the various genres it fit into. Scifi, locked room mystery, police procedural, maybe a bit gothic? It felt a little claustrophobic at times, uncomfortable, haunting, and tense but it was also very thought provoking and asked a lot of great questions, many related to AI and freedom.

While I enjoyed the premise and the many questions, the story itself felt unresolved. I've read some other reviews that seemed to like this but it left me feeling disappointed, this the 3.5 instead of 4. I enjoyed it but wish we had been given a little more at the end.