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amado1I read this last night! It's about 320 pages, and I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads, although, you know, that's 4 stars as a YA romance book, NOT 4 stars as a sci-fi book. As a sci-fi book I'd probably give it 2/5.
The premise: Cat is five years old when her father, a cyberneticist, brings home a human-looking android named Finn. Finn is one of a kind, and as Cat grows up, she falls in love with him, but refuses to admit it, because she can't be with an android. The book follows her from age five to probably her mid-40s, when she has a son of her own and both her parents are dead.
As most of the focus is on Cat, we see detailed portraits of her high school days, her college friends and adventures as a fiber artist, her time as a "vice girl" selling cigarettes, her unhappy marriage to an AI engineer, her divorce, her pregnancy, etc etc. Our glimpses of Finn are always from Cat's POV; we don't see his inner thoughts or motivations. Since Cat is a particularly incurious narrator, this means that for much of the book, we really don't know a single damn thing about Finn!
The journey takes Cat from a 5-year-old who refuses to believe Finn is an android, to a young adult who fiercely reminds herself and him that he can't feel anything while also using him for sex, to a more mature adult who understands the ways she's used and hurt Finn and now sees him fully as a person.
The good:
Prose: The prose is delicious. Sharp, intricate descriptions, fully sensory, especially in the beginning and middle of the novel. The scenery is LUSH, whether we're in a country home in the South or an industrial wasteland in the North. These are beautiful descriptions, with a sense of character, and they're engaging too, so you keep on trucking as a reader.
Emotion: Especially with Cat's parents, and with her husband Richard, the author has a talent for drawing out subtle complex emotions without ever outright stating anything. As a writer, I occasionally caught myself analyzing a particularly emotional scene, wondering how I would write it -- not "how I would improve on it", but "if I were writing this from scratch, how would I have done it?" And Clarke beat me every time. In particular, I remember Cat's wedding, her dance with Richard. If it were me, without thinking, I'd probably make some comment about how Richard's breath brushes over the shell of her ear and stinks like (whatever food they've been eating). But Clarke manages to paint unlikable, or sad, or tense angry pictures without going for the obvious. Richard's breath doesn't stink. It just brushes over Cat's ear, and the reader shudders nonetheless.
Finn: What can I say, I love an android. I'll highlight my favorite thing about Finn, which requires some backstory, and I'll warn you, I don't necessarily LIKE his backstory. Created in the most cliche way, Finn is identical to his creator's dead son, and calls her "Mother". She, for some reason, gave him the capacity for emotion but locked all those emotions up under an obedience program. Then she decided she hated him because he wasn't actually her son, and Finn was rescued by Cat's father, Dr. Novak, and lived in the Novak family home as Cat's tutor and Dr. Novak's lab assistant.
Years later, Dr. Novak shut Finn down against his will and removed the obedience program without asking. With his emotions unleashed, Finn was furious and decided to auction himself off. He was sold for $3 billion to a company colonizing the moon and spent years on the lunar station, working alongside humans as a piece of sentient equipment. When he returned, Finn explained his reasons to Cat: His whole life, people have expected him to be human somehow. His creator expected him to be her son; Cat expected him to be her boyfriend; Dr. Novak removed his obedience program against his will and gave him "more human" emotions. But Finn doesn't WANT to be human. He IS an android. That's why he sold himself off as a piece of equipment, to emphasize that he's an android above all else.
I thought that was fun and complex, although my own retelling here doesn't sound half as logical as it did in the book...
Cat: I loved Cat's character. Complex, selfish, cold, she has a tendency to use men, but in a way that often gets her hurt and reminded me a lot of real-life abusive relationships, both those I've been in and those I've witnessed. Cat isn't attracted to Richard and doesn't love him, but she knows she can't be with Finn -- and anyway, she won't allow herself to even acknowledge that she WANTS to be with Finn! -- and Richard is wealthy, he leaves her alone for weeks at a time, he gives her gifts... what is there to lose by marrying him?
But Cat's lack of affection for Richard puts strain on their relationship, as does his determination to create robots that are intelligent but not sentient (to get around new anti-slavery laws), as does Cat's decision to donate sporadically to the Automaton Defense League using Richard's money. It all culminates in violence where Cat is clearly the victim but also clearly flawed and culpable in a way that struck me as relatable, true to life, and fairly rare for a fictional depiction of abuse.
The bad:
Prose: 😅😅😅 Once or twice it tips into abominable purple prose. The worst example that I remember was, of course, highlighted by other people so many times that Kindle pre-highlighted it for me. This might not be word-for-word, but it was, "She felt like a seashell: pretty enough, but empty inside, and so easy to break." These minor moments of purple prose were easy to ignore, but at about the 50% mark, I noticed a definite downgrade in the prose quality overall. As if the author got tired of writing! At first, since this is set during Cat's bad marriage, I assumed it was a literary device, a deliberate attempt to show how colorless and dull her life had become. But the colorless, dull prose continues all the way to the end of the novel, even when Cat is living back at home, reconnecting with her dad, building a strong loving relationship with her son, and rekindling a romance with Finn.
Moments to Cut: I'm not sure how else to label this! Two early moments come to mind. The first is when teenage Cat is confronted by a popular boy in school who also happens to be the fundie pastor's son, and hates androids. The dialogue here is so clunky and over-the-top prejudiced that I was embarrassed. Later -- different but similar -- Cat's boyfriend doses her with acid against her will. The result is some beautiful prose, a great description of hallucinogenic highs. If Clarke hasn't actually done acid or shrooms, I'd be shocked. She wrote it so, so well. But it was bizarrely out of place in the novel. I got the impression that this was an autobiographical event, that Clarke hadn't planned to include it, but that she liked the prose so much she couldn't stand to cut it. An editor should have snipped it right out.
(And it WAS beautiful, definitely, but I'm baffled about why it's in the book at all)
The Ending: Easily the worst part of the story, although somehow, it was exactly what I wanted. It just happened far too fast and far too easily. I would divide this book into four parts, uneven. The first 50% is all about Cat failing to realize she's treated Finn poorly. The next 30% involve Cat disentangling herself from a bad marriage and healing. The next 15% is Cat slowly realizing she's been a bad friend to Finn and making the first tiny baby steps to improve that (Finn is not here and cannot be affected by her baby steps; it's purely internal). The final 5% is Finn arriving back on Earth and making dramatic new revelations about EXACTLY how badly he's been treated and how DEEPLY the Novaks have fucked up!
But that 5% is brushed aside immediately. Cat gives Finn his first orgasm by sensually stroking his off-button, and he goes, "Oop, nevermind, that felt really good, I'm not mad anymore :3" and they live happily ever after.
While I enjoyed Cat's slow journey, this ending was totally unsatisfying. I wanted them to end up together, but hell, you gotta put in the work! This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the book could have easily been twice as long -- 600 pages instead of 300 -- to devote the proper time necessary for Cat and Finn to come together. We could have followed Cat all the way into her 80s in pursuit of that satisfying (or bittersweet) ending.
But that's very much a "what could have been" criticism.
Another minor level of disappointment that has nothing to do with the author and everything to do with me: I had hoped, going in, that this would be a hard sci-fi book in the same vein as Octavia Butler, Mary Doria Russel, and Carolyn Ives Gilman -- not necessarily "hard sciences" like physics, but hard sci-fi with a focus on well-researched, thoughtfully-written "soft sciences". Gilman's Halfway Human is the obvious choice to compare this to. Her main character is a lot like Finn, and the book takes American slavery and transposes it gracefully onto a sci-fi far-future setting. But Clarke shies away from the worldbuilding at every turn. Her narrator's lack of curiosity allows her to avoid telling us anything detailed about the world Cat lives in.
We know that there were The Disasters before Cat was born, and that automata helped rebuild. We know that Finn isn't like those automata. We know that at some point in the novel's first 30 years, an Automaton Defense League springs up and some anti-slavery laws are presumably passed (but apparently don't apply to the corporation Finn sold himself to, or don't apply to Finn, but the reasons are never discussed). Clarke apparently went to school for engineering but she gives her main character discalculia, a convenient excuse to never go into how Finn was made, or how he differs from other androids -- Cat simply can't understand it, so there's no point!
This is a minor thing, but in a worldbuilding sense, it bugged me. It's established that Finn can't eat or drink, but he can taste things. Later, we learn that he's just a mess of wires and circuit boards inside a human-shaped cell. He doesn't have replica organs or human anatomy or anything like that. We ALSO learn that when he hears a new word or phrase, he repeats it back in the voice of whoever said it, via recording equipment. Well, since he doesn't have vocal cords, presumably everything he says is emitting from a speaker. Why does he move his lips at all? He doesn't need to. It's little stuff like that that bugged me on a sci-fi level, but like I said at the start, this isn't really a sci-fi novel at all. It's YA romance, and in terms of YA romance, it's quite good.
The premise: Cat is five years old when her father, a cyberneticist, brings home a human-looking android named Finn. Finn is one of a kind, and as Cat grows up, she falls in love with him, but refuses to admit it, because she can't be with an android. The book follows her from age five to probably her mid-40s, when she has a son of her own and both her parents are dead.
As most of the focus is on Cat, we see detailed portraits of her high school days, her college friends and adventures as a fiber artist, her time as a "vice girl" selling cigarettes, her unhappy marriage to an AI engineer, her divorce, her pregnancy, etc etc. Our glimpses of Finn are always from Cat's POV; we don't see his inner thoughts or motivations. Since Cat is a particularly incurious narrator, this means that for much of the book, we really don't know a single damn thing about Finn!
The journey takes Cat from a 5-year-old who refuses to believe Finn is an android, to a young adult who fiercely reminds herself and him that he can't feel anything while also using him for sex, to a more mature adult who understands the ways she's used and hurt Finn and now sees him fully as a person.
The good:
Prose: The prose is delicious. Sharp, intricate descriptions, fully sensory, especially in the beginning and middle of the novel. The scenery is LUSH, whether we're in a country home in the South or an industrial wasteland in the North. These are beautiful descriptions, with a sense of character, and they're engaging too, so you keep on trucking as a reader.
Emotion: Especially with Cat's parents, and with her husband Richard, the author has a talent for drawing out subtle complex emotions without ever outright stating anything. As a writer, I occasionally caught myself analyzing a particularly emotional scene, wondering how I would write it -- not "how I would improve on it", but "if I were writing this from scratch, how would I have done it?" And Clarke beat me every time. In particular, I remember Cat's wedding, her dance with Richard. If it were me, without thinking, I'd probably make some comment about how Richard's breath brushes over the shell of her ear and stinks like (whatever food they've been eating). But Clarke manages to paint unlikable, or sad, or tense angry pictures without going for the obvious. Richard's breath doesn't stink. It just brushes over Cat's ear, and the reader shudders nonetheless.
Finn: What can I say, I love an android. I'll highlight my favorite thing about Finn, which requires some backstory, and I'll warn you, I don't necessarily LIKE his backstory. Created in the most cliche way, Finn is identical to his creator's dead son, and calls her "Mother". She, for some reason, gave him the capacity for emotion but locked all those emotions up under an obedience program. Then she decided she hated him because he wasn't actually her son, and Finn was rescued by Cat's father, Dr. Novak, and lived in the Novak family home as Cat's tutor and Dr. Novak's lab assistant.
Years later, Dr. Novak shut Finn down against his will and removed the obedience program without asking. With his emotions unleashed, Finn was furious and decided to auction himself off. He was sold for $3 billion to a company colonizing the moon and spent years on the lunar station, working alongside humans as a piece of sentient equipment. When he returned, Finn explained his reasons to Cat: His whole life, people have expected him to be human somehow. His creator expected him to be her son; Cat expected him to be her boyfriend; Dr. Novak removed his obedience program against his will and gave him "more human" emotions. But Finn doesn't WANT to be human. He IS an android. That's why he sold himself off as a piece of equipment, to emphasize that he's an android above all else.
I thought that was fun and complex, although my own retelling here doesn't sound half as logical as it did in the book...
Cat: I loved Cat's character. Complex, selfish, cold, she has a tendency to use men, but in a way that often gets her hurt and reminded me a lot of real-life abusive relationships, both those I've been in and those I've witnessed. Cat isn't attracted to Richard and doesn't love him, but she knows she can't be with Finn -- and anyway, she won't allow herself to even acknowledge that she WANTS to be with Finn! -- and Richard is wealthy, he leaves her alone for weeks at a time, he gives her gifts... what is there to lose by marrying him?
But Cat's lack of affection for Richard puts strain on their relationship, as does his determination to create robots that are intelligent but not sentient (to get around new anti-slavery laws), as does Cat's decision to donate sporadically to the Automaton Defense League using Richard's money. It all culminates in violence where Cat is clearly the victim but also clearly flawed and culpable in a way that struck me as relatable, true to life, and fairly rare for a fictional depiction of abuse.
The bad:
Prose: 😅😅😅 Once or twice it tips into abominable purple prose. The worst example that I remember was, of course, highlighted by other people so many times that Kindle pre-highlighted it for me. This might not be word-for-word, but it was, "She felt like a seashell: pretty enough, but empty inside, and so easy to break." These minor moments of purple prose were easy to ignore, but at about the 50% mark, I noticed a definite downgrade in the prose quality overall. As if the author got tired of writing! At first, since this is set during Cat's bad marriage, I assumed it was a literary device, a deliberate attempt to show how colorless and dull her life had become. But the colorless, dull prose continues all the way to the end of the novel, even when Cat is living back at home, reconnecting with her dad, building a strong loving relationship with her son, and rekindling a romance with Finn.
Moments to Cut: I'm not sure how else to label this! Two early moments come to mind. The first is when teenage Cat is confronted by a popular boy in school who also happens to be the fundie pastor's son, and hates androids. The dialogue here is so clunky and over-the-top prejudiced that I was embarrassed. Later -- different but similar -- Cat's boyfriend doses her with acid against her will. The result is some beautiful prose, a great description of hallucinogenic highs. If Clarke hasn't actually done acid or shrooms, I'd be shocked. She wrote it so, so well. But it was bizarrely out of place in the novel. I got the impression that this was an autobiographical event, that Clarke hadn't planned to include it, but that she liked the prose so much she couldn't stand to cut it. An editor should have snipped it right out.
(And it WAS beautiful, definitely, but I'm baffled about why it's in the book at all)
The Ending: Easily the worst part of the story, although somehow, it was exactly what I wanted. It just happened far too fast and far too easily. I would divide this book into four parts, uneven. The first 50% is all about Cat failing to realize she's treated Finn poorly. The next 30% involve Cat disentangling herself from a bad marriage and healing. The next 15% is Cat slowly realizing she's been a bad friend to Finn and making the first tiny baby steps to improve that (Finn is not here and cannot be affected by her baby steps; it's purely internal). The final 5% is Finn arriving back on Earth and making dramatic new revelations about EXACTLY how badly he's been treated and how DEEPLY the Novaks have fucked up!
But that 5% is brushed aside immediately. Cat gives Finn his first orgasm by sensually stroking his off-button, and he goes, "Oop, nevermind, that felt really good, I'm not mad anymore :3" and they live happily ever after.
While I enjoyed Cat's slow journey, this ending was totally unsatisfying. I wanted them to end up together, but hell, you gotta put in the work! This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the book could have easily been twice as long -- 600 pages instead of 300 -- to devote the proper time necessary for Cat and Finn to come together. We could have followed Cat all the way into her 80s in pursuit of that satisfying (or bittersweet) ending.
But that's very much a "what could have been" criticism.
Another minor level of disappointment that has nothing to do with the author and everything to do with me: I had hoped, going in, that this would be a hard sci-fi book in the same vein as Octavia Butler, Mary Doria Russel, and Carolyn Ives Gilman -- not necessarily "hard sciences" like physics, but hard sci-fi with a focus on well-researched, thoughtfully-written "soft sciences". Gilman's Halfway Human is the obvious choice to compare this to. Her main character is a lot like Finn, and the book takes American slavery and transposes it gracefully onto a sci-fi far-future setting. But Clarke shies away from the worldbuilding at every turn. Her narrator's lack of curiosity allows her to avoid telling us anything detailed about the world Cat lives in.
We know that there were The Disasters before Cat was born, and that automata helped rebuild. We know that Finn isn't like those automata. We know that at some point in the novel's first 30 years, an Automaton Defense League springs up and some anti-slavery laws are presumably passed (but apparently don't apply to the corporation Finn sold himself to, or don't apply to Finn, but the reasons are never discussed). Clarke apparently went to school for engineering but she gives her main character discalculia, a convenient excuse to never go into how Finn was made, or how he differs from other androids -- Cat simply can't understand it, so there's no point!
This is a minor thing, but in a worldbuilding sense, it bugged me. It's established that Finn can't eat or drink, but he can taste things. Later, we learn that he's just a mess of wires and circuit boards inside a human-shaped cell. He doesn't have replica organs or human anatomy or anything like that. We ALSO learn that when he hears a new word or phrase, he repeats it back in the voice of whoever said it, via recording equipment. Well, since he doesn't have vocal cords, presumably everything he says is emitting from a speaker. Why does he move his lips at all? He doesn't need to. It's little stuff like that that bugged me on a sci-fi level, but like I said at the start, this isn't really a sci-fi novel at all. It's YA romance, and in terms of YA romance, it's quite good.
