@tbrbeyondtours & @debcaletti
Book Info:
True Life in Uncanny Valley by Deb Caletti
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary
Publishing Date: March 18, 2025
My Review:
5 plus Where to start. Uau. This was such a clever, wonderful read. There are so many layers. Let's go from general to particular: and YA story of a girl who wants to meet her father, who wants to know who this horrible person who made two daughters may be who never cared. She starts stalking the house and analyzing what she sees and understands through the lens of comic books and comic book language: heroes, villains, zip, zap onomatopoeia, and action lines. Her dad is a big shot, famous, and he is working on a project that will revolutionize the future, going deeper into AI, under the misunderstanding and false presence that AI is the solution to never make mistakes again. This is a novel that points out how dangerous AI is. Not just learning and stealing from artists and authors but taking all the good from it to deliver an easy, fast, adulterated product.
This novel shouts out: are we letting our children and the future be taught and educated by AI? Where is the freedom of being oneself, true, happy, and joyful?
The plot gets even more interesting when she accepts to be hired as the nanny of a two-year-old who is, in fact, her half-brother.
I love her relationship with the family Where she works (her dad's) I love how relatable it is when she has to go back home and her mother and sister always make her feel like she doesn't belong so there's a feeling of in between (she doesn't belong at home anymore, but she won't belong with her father)
Towards the end, she becomes more confident, an artist, a hero, someone who appreciates the imperfections of life, and she will do good for those who need her help, and she will punish those who reveal themselves to be villains after all.
There's just so much to it. It's thought-provoking.
I loved this novel. I will recommend it over and over.
Synopsis:
From the acclaimed author of A Heart in a Body in the World comes the gripping story of a girl living a lie in order to find the truth about her family and herself.
Eleanor, like so many others, is used to watching her famous father from afar. To the world, Hugo Harrison is the brilliant and charismatic tech genius whose AI inventions seem to create a new, better reality. But to Eleanor, whose mother had an affair with Hugo years ago, he is something even more intriguing, and dangerous—a secret.
When Eleanor’s spying leads her to a posting for a live-in summer nanny job for Hugo’s young son—her half-brother—she knows she has to apply. This is finally her chance to learn about her father, his family, and the life that could have been hers. She only has to do one become someone else. With just a few well-placed lies, Eleanor is catapulted into an unfamiliar, intoxicating whirlwind of money and ego, and into a new romance with a cute boy who works for Hugo. But in a place where image is everything and reality can be rewritten, is anything real—even the Harrisons themselves?
Caught between her own secrets and the ones she’s uncovering about her father and his latest invention, Eleanor faces a question that technology can’t what is your true self, and how do you know when you find her?
Book Links:
About the Author:
Deb Caletti is the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of nearly twenty books for adults and young adults, including Honey, Baby, Sweetheart, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Heart in a Body in the World, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. Her books have also won the Josette Frank Award for Fiction, the Washington State Book Award, and numerous other state awards and honors, and she was a finalist for the PEN USA Award. She lives with her family in Seattle.
Author Links:
Website: https://www.debcaletti.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/debcaletti/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/135786
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