Annie Bot in Play Book Tag

Jul 31, 2024 Liz Alb rated it liked it

Shelves: 52-books-challenge-2024

It’s been 30 minutes since I’ve turned the final page and I’m struggling to collect my thoughts about this book.

Overall, the premise seemed so interesting: A man purchases an AI robot to be his “companion” at home and in bed. Through time, the robot named Annie comes to realize that life under someone’s complete and utter control can be pretty miserable.

Let me start by saying that I normally don’t have a visceral reaction to characters in a novel. But, in this case, I had to consistently fight It’s been 30 minutes since I’ve turned the final page and I’m struggling to collect my thoughts about this book.

Overall, the premise seemed so interesting: A man purchases an AI robot to be his “companion” at home and in bed. Through time, the robot named Annie comes to realize that life under someone’s complete and utter control can be pretty miserable.

Let me start by saying that I normally don’t have a visceral reaction to characters in a novel. But, in this case, I had to consistently fight the urge to drop the book and go do something to lift my spirits. Maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to read this book. Or maybe the author did such a fantastic job at creating an insufferable narcissistic loser that I couldn’t help but feel my stomach churn every time he uttered a word.

Also, the fact that Doug went from one end of the personality spectrum (aka a**hole) to the other (aka Mister Wonderful) made no sense to me. Perhaps he had become more conniving in his attempts to manipulate Annie but I felt that the author simply tried to turn him into a good guy overnight in order to make it appear that karma came back to bite him in the end… which it really didn’t. In fact, the ending was completely unsatisfying for me.

From an AI subject matter perspective, there seemed to be many opportunities for Greer to further delve into the AI concept and how that translated into Annie’s evolution. For example, how did artificial learning translate to emotional development and desire? These were leaps that I couldn’t quite comprehend based on Annie’s ability to feel jealousy, rage, guilt, etc.

Although this novel qualifies as science fiction/fantasy, it ultimately comes across as contemporary fiction novel dealing with relationships and emotional abuse. I also struggle with the tags of ‘literary fiction” and ‘feminism” attached to this book as they just don’t align with my perception. The repetitive sex scenes were also a bit much and I tended to skip over those.

After much thought, I rated this one 3 stars which is subject to change as I continue to think about it. ...more

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