Thank you NetGalley, Sarah Crossan, and Little, Brown and Company for allowing me to read an advanced copy of Hey, Zoey. I received an advanced reader copy for free and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

What an absolutely intriguing, thought provoking book. Dolores finds an AI sex doll, Zoey, that her husband keeps hidden away in their garage. This discovery leads to Dolores going through her past to uncover why she is the way she is in the present.

Each thought about the past is broken between different segments in which the present also comes into play. There is no direct timeline or order in which these thoughts occur. Everything is sort of jumbled around, yet it makes sense how it all strings together in the end.

Zoey makes Dolores question so much, even though this is not the intention of Zoey. The delicate approach to the overall theme played really well into the unique writing style the author used.

I was really disappointed with Hey, Zoey, but I will admit that it is partially my fault. The major problem was wrong expectations.

The premise sounded fantastic. Interactions between humans and AI have been done to death, but I’ve never come across this particular premise— the interaction between a woman and her husband’s sex robot. I was extremely interested in what the book would have to say.

Perhaps I did too much expecting from this book; I went into it anticipating a certain type of story-- a sci-fi/speculative fiction about the ethics of having sex with what is essentially a mindlessly-compliant woman --and what I actually got was a contemporary about a woman using her present to confront her past.

Zoey wasn’t as important a character as I wanted her to be. I think she could have just been a doll, minus the AI aspect, and the same message would have come across. I was really interested in seeing the conversations between these two women now that AI are coming up with intelligent, complex responses, but that was never the point of this book.

So... what about the actual story, not the one I thought I should be reading?

I think I would have liked it better if I went in with the right expectations, but it would not have been more than a 3-star read for me. There was way too much of Dolores and Gavin having these weird awkward conversations about nothing. It made me think of someone trying to emulate Sally Rooney, which always comes across as weird to me (see Cleopatra and Frankenstein).

There was also a lot of darting back and forth between the past and present, sometimes in very short snippets, to the extent that I often found it jarring. Also-- unless I am very confused, which is possible --the flashbacks did not appear to be in chronological order, making it quite difficult to follow sometimes.

I much preferred Crossan's Here Is the Beehive.

I thought this was really well written. I wished flashback portion flowed a little better and that Delores and Zoey's kinship was introduced a little sooner. Too much time was spent on her and David having these non conversations. I had a felling that the Gavin thing was a thing and I can appreciate that it was never said outloud.