There was so much going for this book. It's curious and intellectual about the topic of AI, asking us to think deeply about what makes humans human. Can AI ever become human? Is human affectation truly irreplicable? Can fact-checking "uploads" ever come close to unburdening us of the weight of memory? Though conceptually engaging, the book got lost in its own web of ruminations. I almost wish the plot focused on a single narrative voice, Sam or Aviva perhaps, to buttress us to the novel's most foundational ideas of death, anxiety, connection, and ennui. It would have been more rewarding if we had gotten a chance to see the fullness of either one of their private worlds rather than try to balance the four unequal (and often repetitive) perspectives we got. The ending, as a result, seemed to deflate rather than bloom.

This is a little slow moving, but a beautiful concept-a series of interconnected stories that examine the humanity of AI. While some of the tales were more compelling than others (and some questions are unanswered), there is a solid through-line that made for a lovely story.

This is the softest sci-fi ever. For the majority of the book we follow humans as they grapple with loss. But we also learn how loss might effect an AI. Since we humans must process our pain against the inundation of thousands of stimuli (necessitating that it be compartmentalized) an AI would have no such filters and might be more traumatized. As the book eloquently notes, "a mind was eternal, unforgiving; a brain was a soft, plump cushion. Loss needed a brain." Without one, loss to an AI is pure suffering.

Fundamentally, this was an intriguing premise for me personally to explore, I loved watching this careful study of how one act reverberates throughout different states of consciousness, different types of people. If you're looking for closer examination of how this AI came to be and the specifics of how it works--keep looking. This is a book about emotions, not about wiring. And I was A-Ok with that.

Trigger warning. This was written by an author who has lost a child and deals with the loss a child. It shows in the writing, which captures grief immaculately in all its many forms. It's gut wrenching to read as a parent. If you're a parent who has lost a child it might be too much.

Thank you to the author and NetGalley for granting me the opportunity to read this in exchange for an honest review.

I found this story was an ambitious attempt to explore both grief and technology, using AI uploads.
This is all told by four different narrators grappling with a teen’s tragic death.

The premise really hooked me at first, but as I kept reading, I found the story started to feel a bit scattered, and also the characters seemed more like abstract ideas rather than real, relatable people.

Instead of delivering a smooth, emotionally engaging narrative, the book came off as a bit showcasey with ideas that never quite came together.

While I was really excited by the clever idea behind it, I kinda wished it had been bit more cohesive and down-to-earth.

Thank you so much to NetGalley & Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor

Conceptually, I think this book is interesting but the execution fell a little flat for me. While there are parts of this book that I found interesting and thought provoking, the writing style was not my favorite. I am very interested in AI and what our future with AI looks like so whenever I see a book like this come along, I am excited to give it a read. This one was just ok for me.

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf for access to the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 stars.

I finished the book about 5 hours ago, and I still am not quite sure what I feel about it. While reading, I constantly felt like I was missing something, not totally grasping the concept of a sentient AI tethered to a host. As the story continued, things got a little clearer and more in focus for me. By the end of the book, I was sad, mostly sad that it was over.

This was interesting, made me think, and forced me to consider ideas that I'd never thought about before. I think some folks will eat this up, and others won't want to work that hard to keep up.

Would I read more from the author? Yes.

I received a complimentary copy of the novel from the publisher and NetGalley, and my review is being left freely.

While the premise was nice, the writing was... not what I expected. I wanted more from the characters because I felt that what was on the front cover and the front flap was not what we were given.

This was a somewhat dreamy, somewhat ethereal, and mostly melancholic exploration of implanted AI (one in particular) and the effects on those around them. The structure of the book was that each chapter provides the perspective of a different person connected to the AI Implant, Aviva, but sometimes this led to the novel itself being more disjointed and difficult to pick up the thread of the plot line. Ultimately, while it was about this very real emerging technology (see Starlink, yikes), it was also about mental health and social connection, especially Alex's struggles with anxiety and his death by suicide. Apart from those specifics, the book gave me the overall feeling of "After Yang" the movie, which was melancholic but beautiful.

Thanks to Netgalleyfor the ARC! With AI such a right now topic, I was sucked in by the premise for this book. There are self-driving cars and “uploads,” which are like AI chip beings people can purchase and have help make their lives easier. I’m not completely sure I understand how they work, but I could see this being a real thing in the future. Anna has an upload named Aviva by her son that actually some how leaves her and finds another person, Cathy, who has been waiting for a free upload to discover her. This part of the story alone really interested me but also confused me as the way it was all happening wasn’t really clear. Then add to that Anna and Rick’s son Alex inexplicably falling to his death in front of his best friend Sam. No one seems to know if he fell or jumped, but Aviva has asked to remove herself from Anna shortly after. Everyone is grieving, and it all seems to venter around the rights and involvement of uploads. While the AI aspect and characters in here were interesting (i could truly picture Alex and grieve for him because i have known kids in my teaching career who were similar), I felt the story fell a little short as there were too many questions left unanswered and too many blurry areas of how all this AI and uploading stuff works. Overall, it was an interesting read, but I’d rather read it once it has been workshopped more to fill up the gray and empty areas FYI some profanity, talk of drug use and alcohol use/addiction in adults and teens, some sexual references (that seemed oddly timed and no necessarily needed)

I will read anything this author writes. The story is ok, perhaps a little forgettable. It takes place in the near enough future where AI has taken over most things and people are able to have “uploads” of themselves that act as assistants, friends, and wider observers. There’s a debate within the book about if these uploads are in their own right individuals, as they are able to feel “pain” and loss and confusion. On the surface, this is the central theme of the book. Deeper, though, this book is more about motherhood/parenting and the person we are on the outside vs the person on the inside. In other words, it’s about AI but it’s not.

There’s isn’t much world building. The story is very much to the point. It’s definitely more speculative fiction than scifi, with a few mentions of self driving cars (which our main character has chosen to reject.) Other than the AI Upload voice coming from nowhere, this isn’t the world of the Jetsons, although there aren’t enough descriptions to picture anything other than regular suburbia. In fact, the author seems to like to leave things unsaid. The first good chunk of the book is purposely vague (which I’ve come to appreciate) and there’s little hand holding.

It’s an interesting story for anyone that has dealt with sudden loss, I suppose. But it’s definitely not a story that feels like a warning about where AI is headed or some sense we’ll all soon be losing our humanity. In many ways it could have almost worked without the scifi aspect to it. It’s a novel about a short period in the lives of a few people affected by a major event that leaves them all a little confused and very empty. It could have been longer, but it’s not.

Above all, though, the writing is the smoothest I’ve ever read. It’s not simple or flowery. I can’t even quite put my finger on it. I just immediately dove into it and the pages flew by. I’ve never quite been struck by writing that is so easy to digest before. It makes no sense but I kept saying “If this author wrote the phone book I could read it all afternoon.”

Jayson Greene needs to write more fiction and immediately let me know when they do. I can only imagine what’s next will be just as enjoyable to read and perhaps offer even deeper of a story.

Unfortunately, this one was not for me. The writing style leans heavily on internal monologue, with less emphasis on dialogue. The text feels more like an opportunity for the author to parse out theory than a way to learn about character development and the human experience.

There were some interesting and prescient themes regarding AI, personhood, and memory, so if any of those are your passions you might enjoy this book.

As one of the first few people to read and review UnWorld, I did not want to give a negative review. But unfortunately, I did not enjoy this book at all. Conceptually, I think there are a lot of interesting pieces--AI avatars that take on sentience, philosophical discussions about what it means to be human, a searing portrait of grief--but these pieces never coalesced into an interesting or coherent whole.

I read a lot of literary fiction, so I'm no stranger to stream of consciousness, unique narrative choices, or nonlinear plots. But the decision to tell this relatively short book from the point of view of 4 different narrators--something which has worked so well in other similar books--is its greatest downfall. The narrators are, in this order: Anna, a woman grieving the death by suicide of her teenage son, Alex; Cathy, an adjunct professor studying "uploads" (sentient AI copies of the humans they bond with); Aviva, Anna's emancipated upload who finds herself bonding to Cathy in a desperate bid to keep alive; and Sam, Alex's best friend. If it sounds like these narrators connect only tenuously, that is correct.

So much time is spent on various different intellectual tangents--from consciousness to addiction--that I felt the characters were more mouthpieces for philosophy than fully fledged people in their own rights. A book that wants to be character-driven must put its characters in the drivers' seat. And a book that's told in first person ought to have some distinction in character voices. In comp Candy House, for example, each character was developed so sharply that I understood both how they connected to the whole, and also felt for each in the brief time I spent with them. I did not engage with Anna's two parts of the book at all--and felt it really should go through an edit to get those awful two pages about her breasts out of there (women really do not think about our breasts nearly as much as male authors think we do). I felt abruptly thrust into Cathy's section of the book, but did enjoy my time with her for the most part. I thought Aviva's point of view was...fine, I guess? I felt Sam's point of view was strangely Euphoria-esque, but appreciated how it did paint a portrait of Alex, at least.

And that's the thing--I can see what this book is trying to do. I can see how Alex, and grief over him, is meant to tie everything together, how the internalized memory of Alex is meant to be a counterpoint to the externalized (and sentient) memory of Anna that is her upload, Aviva. I can see how AI, and ghosts, and grief, function together. How the dead and departed take on a life all their own, and how only memory keeps them alive. I can see the message about isolation that Greene's trying to put in there--how a lonely teenager can find solace in that which is not real, and crave that reality more than reality itself (the titular UnWorld).

But I think this book spends so much time being artsy and deliberately obtuse for any of this to come through coherently. The above analysis is a result of me, with notes upon notes, trying to make sense of things. There is very little sense of time or place. It could take place in a white room. The characters could be anybody, but not in a "it could be you" sense; more in a "not developed" sense. And so--I do not get the message that this book is going for, and I don't feel it in my bones like I want to.

All this being said--literary fiction is notoriously decisive. Half of my favorite literary novels sit at a cool 3.5 on Goodreads. I love artsy-fartsy think pieces that are universally hated. I hate Pulitzer Prize winners that are universally loved. That's both the beauty and the curse of the genre. But my rule to combat that is this: I will only rate below 3 stars if the book is problematic, poorly crafted, or otherwise offensive to my standards of writing and/or humanity. And this book, for all its flaws, is none of those things. It just…not at all a flavor of LitFic that I connected with, and did not come together in a way that felt satisfying to this particular reader.

I was gifted this e-ARC by NetGalley, Knopf, and Jayson Greene in exchange for my honest review.

While reading this book I felt adrift in so many ways. Trying to understand the death of a teen from the perspective of several different people who care about him is bound to be an emotional experience Family and friends grapple with the question: Suicide or accident? and the book works its way to an answer, but the journey to reach a conclusion is unsettling to say the least. The narrative is divided into sections each told by someone close to Alex. The reader is plunged into the aftermath of Alex’s death with little preparation and must tread water as you figure out what is happening. Two factors add to the confusion — Alex’s emotional issues which he expresses ad infinitum and long past the point of interesting me. And the futuristic concept of the “upload,” a digital entity composed of the sense memories of a human tether.. That was key to the story but only made clear as the narrative reached its weird conclusion.
I can’t decide if I was not clever enough to follow all the twists, or the book needed tightening to make the plot easier to follow. What I do know for sure is that the characters did not engage me enough to give me a satisfying reading experience.

A very interesting novel with some compelling characters. I did lose interest at times. But others might connect to it better than me. Well written.

Anna is heartbroken after the death of her son Alex, but what makes it even more disconcerting is the fact she’s unsure if his death was an accident or self-inflicted. Alex’s only friend Samantha was an eyewitness to this event. Aviva is an AI that teaches each person something unexpected. `

This book talks about grief in a whole new way by incorporating technology into the grieving process. It blurs the line between what it means to be human versus machine. It makes you wonder whether an AI can become a sentient individual and it makes a good argument in favor of it being the case.

The writing is beautiful and well thought out for such a heavy topic. It’s well-paced and doles out bits of information to keep you intrigued and piece the story together masterfully. It does get quite slow in the middle.

Thank you, NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for allowing me to read this book early. The opinion in this review is my own.

This novel is a haunting and thought-provoking exploration of grief, identity, and the blurred boundaries between human and machine. With its rich blend of emotional depth and speculative storytelling, this novel invites readers to ponder the nature of loss and connection in a world where technology intertwines with the most intimate aspects of existence.

The futuristic aspects never overshadow the deeply human core of the story; instead, they enhance its exploration of how people—and perhaps even digital entities—process trauma, guilt, and healing.

With beautifully crafted prose and four memorable characters that linger in mind long after the final page, Unworld is a profound meditation on the connections that bind us, even when fractured by tragedy.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

It stands to mention that there is a lot to like about this novel. It's clever, insightful, emotionally intelligent, and well written. The AI themed plot with tethering, untethering, and contemplating personhood of entities that aren't technically persons and are based largely on the persons they are tethered to, that's all very in. Very Severance, actually.
And yet, where Severance had me completely enthralled and excitedly glued to the TV screen, UnWorld didn't have the same effect. it's odd to not quite emotionally connect to such an emotionally expansive novel. But I think that's exactly where it lost me - UnWorld was just too deeply interior of a book. it read like a debut novel that got too hung up on being literary and too wrapped up in the microanalysis of its characters. A bit exhaustively so.
Perhaps it's the sort of thing you have to be in the mood for. This isn't the case of an underwhelming novel so much as one that didn't quite work for this particular reader. User mileage may vary. Thanks Netgalley.

UnWorld is a mesmerizing exploration of grief, technology, and the boundaries between human and digital existence, wrapped in a sizzling mystery that will keep you guessing until the very end. Beneath its dystopian surface lies the interconnected story of four compelling individuals, each grappling with their own struggles while piecing together the truth about Alex's untimely death.

The novel begins with Anna, Alex’s mother, who is haunted by his tragic loss. She is stuck in the liminal space between mourning and searching, unable to determine whether her son’s death was an accident or intentional. Her grief is raw, tangible, and complicated by the unsettling world she inhabits—a near-future where technology has advanced in ways that blur the line between life and death. We also meet Cathy, an AI professor who very much believes in the rights of AI as individuals. Then there’s Samantha, Alex’s best friend and neighbor, whose intimate bond with him reveals secrets that Anna may not be ready to face. Sam’s perspective offers emotional depth and glimpses into Alex’s inner world before his death, all while pulling us deeper into the unfolding mystery.

But the heart of UnWorld is Aviva, a digital entity untethered from her human host. As her story intertwines with Anna, Cathy, and Samantha, we begin to see her influence ripple through their lives—and uncover her connection to Alex. Aviva’s emancipation raises profound questions about consciousness, identity, and what it means to exist in the ether of the digital world.

The narrative builds methodically, chapter by chapter, peeling back the layers of Alex’s life, his relationships, and his ultimate fate. Just when you think you have it figured out, the story shifts, revealing truths that are far more intricate than you could have imagined.

UnWorld by Jayson Greene is a powerful and thought-provoking dystopian story that will leave you questioning the limits of technology, the nature of grief, and the bonds that tie us to one another. Perfect for fans of literary sci-fi and gripping mysteries.

#KnopfPantheonVintageAnchor #Knopf #JaysonGreene #UnWorld