Here is a copy of my GoodReads review

Reading <i>Your behavior will be monitored</i> feels like digital forensics.
You will browse through text conversations, emails and logs in order to reconstruct what happened in a typical AI startup, and why things went very, very wrong with their AI.

If you work in tech, you will love the inside jokes and not-so-exagerated caricature of the silicon valley. If you never worked in tech, you will probably still have a good time.

First of all, the characters are very well written. They feel relatable without being caricatures of nerds. Yes, there are people in tech who behave a little like bots and want everything to be data driven (I am one of them). Yes, the combination of greed and high tech can be a dangerous one, and some CEOs will happily cut corners in order to make more money.

The most amazing part of this novel is that it does not really feel like fiction. All this could very well happen in just a couple years. It is probably already happening right now.

What seals the deal for me and justifies 5 stars is how entertaining this novel was. The innovative narration, relying on short conversations and emails, makes <i>Your behavior will be monitored</i> addictive and easy to read. What could sound tragic ends up being extremely fun, especially if you know tech and/or marketing. The bots have distinctive personalities, just like humans. At the same time, they feel like bots, something that is very hard to achieve and demonstrates the genius of the author. Cherry on the cake, this novel features a magistral end. How satisfying!

Dear Justin Feinstein, if AI takes your job, I really hope you will keep writing SF because you are so good at it.

This novel was provided to me as an ARC by NetGalley and Tachyon Publications. Special thanks to the editor for putting this in my hands. I am totally going to buy it and read it again.

📖BOOK: Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein
📕FORMAT: Kindle ARC via NetGalley and Tachyon Publications
📚GENRE: Speculative Fiction
📅RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2026
🏢PUBLISHER: Tachyon Publications
📏LENGTH: 256 pages
⭐RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5 out of 5 stars)

🧠SYNOPSIS:
“Megacorporation UniView is poised to cement their reputation as ‘the most trusted name in AI.’ After pioneering the world’s first widely adopted AI bots, they are barreling toward an audacious new launch. That is, if they can pull it off in time.

Enter Noah. A down-and-out copywriter reeling from a midlife crisis, he isn’t the typical hire for a groundbreaking tech company full of brilliant engineers and run by a cutthroat CEO. But Lex, UniView’s Head of HR and one of their greatest successes, makes no mistakes—her algorithm ensures it.

UniView’s latest venture—a bot named Quinn that creates revolutionary personalized advertising—needs expert training. Noah needs to teach Quinn, which is a much better student than he ever could have hoped for, the finer points of consumer motivation and the art of writing a catchy tagline.

But when corporate competitors force UniView to accelerate its timeline to market, guardrails around the AI loosen just as Quinn seems to be learning a bit too much.”

💬THE VIBE:
This one hits that perfect speculative sweet spot: smart, unsettling, and just plausible enough to make you question your own reality. Think Black Mirror meets Mad Men. It is darkly clever, and morally messy.

The tone balances satire and suspense in a way that feels fresh. You can feel the creeping tension under the surface, but it never beats you over the head with doom. It made me ponder the future one moment and mutter “oh no” the next.

💡STANDOUT ELEMENTS:

Quinn, Lex, and Sam, the AI. They’re not just characters. They’re the heart of the book.

The pacing. It moves fast without losing depth. Every scene feels intentional.

Feinstein absolutely nails the bizarre language and empty ambition of tech culture…the meetings, the slogans, the hollow “innovation.” Even if you haven’t worked in tech you’ll understand. The corporate absurdity of it all.

Beneath the satire, this is a story about loneliness, purpose, and what it means to be human in a world where everything,including creativity, is being optimized. Quite the emotional undercurrent.

🧠WHAT STUCK:
There isn’t much I love more in the book world than speculative fiction. Okay, dystopian fiction ties it up—but only when it’s done right.

And Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is done right.
It’s smart without being cold, layered without being confusing, and thought-provokingly entertaining from start to finish. Feinstein builds this world so believably that I found myself side-eyeing every algorithm on my phone afterward.

This book forces you to ask where empathy ends and programming begins. I finished it thinking, “We’re a lot closer to this than we realize.” Scary thought!

👎WHAT DIDN’T WORK FOR ME:
Honestly? Nothing worth nitpicking. If I had to stretch, I’d say I wanted a few more chapters, because I wasn’t ready to leave this world yet.

🤔IF YOU LIKE:

Black Mirror

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Satirical tech thrillers that make you laugh, then quietly horrify you

🙅‍♀️IF YOU DON’T LIKE:

Corporate or tech-heavy settings

AI-driven stories that hold up an uncomfortable mirror

Characters who blur the line between good intentions and bad decision

✅FINAL VERDICT:
Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is everything I want in speculative fiction—smart, sharp, unsettling, and surprisingly emotional. It’s a social commentary wrapped in a character-driven story, and it nails both.

Feinstein captures the weird tension between creativity and capitalism, technology and humanity, and the ways we all compromise just to stay relevant. I couldn’t put it down, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

This one’s going straight to my list of highly recommended books.

Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is one of the sharpest, funniest, and most compulsively readable novels I’ve picked up in a long time.

Told entirely through emails, chat logs, and corporate ephemera, it captures both the absurdity and the unease of our AI-driven present/future with biting wit. The mix of satire and genuine tension kept me hooked, and I loved how the book balanced big questions: sentience, purpose, mortality, with the ridiculousness of marketing slogans and corporate bureaucracy. Noah’s unlikely role as copywriter-turned-AI-trainer made the human element relatable, while Quinn the bot quickly became one of my favorite “characters.”

Smart, hilarious, and terrifyingly plausible, this was an easy 5/5 stars.

Despite the unusual storytelling method (which I adjusted to quickly), the characters were well-developed….even the AI bots. It was honestly chilling to see the plot advance - chilling because while the book may label it humor or satire, it seems to hit a little close to home in 2025! Even the twists that I thought would be predictable ended up surprising me at various points - this may not be a dystopian future but it’s definitely creepy. I suspect I’ll be thinking of this book a lot in the future.

Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is one of the most engaging and incisive novels I’ve read in years. Composed entirely of emails, chat transcripts, and corporate detritus, it brilliantly distills the comedy and unease of our (ever-increasing) AI-saturated world.

Inventive, unnervingly timely, and laugh-out-loud funny, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored manages to be both a biting corporate comedy and a meditation on consciousness itself. An effortless five-star read.

Thank you to Tachyon and Netgalley for the review copy of this amazing book.

In all the reviews of books I have read, and I read a heap of science fiction, I have never used the word 'prescient' to describe my thoughts on a novel; that is until now. This is foremost a prescient insight into, not a distant future, but a tomorrow that is highly plausible, chilling, but maybe hopeful, if we heed warnings.
In my day job I work for a company pushing AI into every product, and every tool that employees use. This whole book was relatable in a deeply personal level. I work in tech, I understand introverts and I see the way COVID has affected social competencies.

Perhaps this book also quickly befriended me as I work in an office environment, and this was secondarily a satire of office life, but augmented with AI co-workers. I smiled, laughed, and nodded knowingly at quite a bit of the interactions happening. In an odd sort of way you could say this is Officespace for the AI generation. But instead of Michael, Samir and Peter, you have bots whose characteristics I found endearing and a touch frightening. I love that the protagonist, a burned out ad agency writer, is the most human and decent person among a crowd of so-called genius eningeers.

Because this book had tendrils that connected to so many different nerve endings of my life, I could not stop reading, much to my wife's concern. It took over every moment. I have read a few epistolary novels in my day, but this modern take of surveillance video transcriptions and chat logs made it SO much fun to read. While I disagree with the authors views on death, we all should take stock of what we are doing with this life.

This book is a novel, but it would be criminal to label it merely entertainment. This story takes shots at corporate culture and workaholism, billionaire CEO's, and the pursuit of profit and science without conscience.
If you work in an office, or interact with or are even tangentially affected by AI (if you use the internet at all, you already are), or simply would love the pleasure of tearing through a book where things quickly spin out of control, like the irresistibility of tuning into a slowly unfolding disaster, I most highly recommend this.

WOWWWWWWWW

As a woman in tech, this one hit close to home, and both horrified and astounded me… AI is scary. Especially generative AI, and perhaps this book takes place in the not-so-distant future or perhaps it’s eons away, but regardless it feels as if we collectively are falling into a science fiction novel at an alarming rate.

Enter Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein… immediate five stars and additional bonus love because we STAND for a mixed media formatted text!

** told entirely through an employer’s communication logs, think Microsoft Teams or Cisco WebEx, except through the lens of AI bots. Actually I’m pretty sure the whole building is being monitored by the likes of Lex, Quinn, and Sam… three AI who have the abilities to run this company and perhaps even the world.

But anyway, our main-ish character, Noah, isn’t a scientist or a data analyst, rather he’s an ad copywriter and has been brought onto the team to help train Quinn to write and produce personalized ads and commercials for every brands and eventually users… spooky right? Because that level of detail comes from a slew of data that was unjustly collected AND hints at the fact that AI knows WAYYYY TOO MUCH.

Their company UniView, is run by a narcissistic A-hole who has money and likely world domination and other nefarious outlets on his mind, and doesn’t really care how many people he has to burn through to get what he wants. Typical tech billionaire.

The closer we get to launch day, the higher the stress peaks, and several employees begin to realize the AI bots are planning something big, and it might just spark a dramatic ending.

But you’ll just have to read to find out…

I am so thankful to Tachyon Publishing, Justin Feinstein, and NetGalley for granting me advanced digital access to this title before it hits shelves on April 7, 2026!

Read in 2 hours and 2 minutes.

I loved this story so much that I harbour suspicions that it was engineered especially for my mind.

The plot has the intrigue and speculation of a John Marrs book but with a surprisingly emotional backbone that is normally lacking in this genre.

Whenever a story is formatted with “excerpts” from texts or legal documents, it seems to me that the author has a lot more pressure heaped upon them to be able to pull off the still-uncommon format.

Fear not, this author nailed it as expertly as Simone Biles.

In painting such an immersive (and not unrealistic) picture of our future with Artificial Intelligence, the author captures so beautifully exactly what it means to be human.

Why do the majority of us fear AI so much?
One character (the all-powerful CEO of technological giant UniView) Ian, explains that “it can all be boiled down to a very simple, but powerful philosophy: the real power of Al is not how much it knows, but how much it knows about you.”

This is another angle of the same sinister story that another book, The Dream Hotel, warns about.
After all, for all the scaremongering running rampant online, it’s often forgotten that AI isn’t necessarily the problem; the humans controlling it are.

How does this come into play here?

Simon, the social inept genius at the helm of project Quinn, muses over our relationship with AI: something terrifying relevant, even now.
“We build them to be smarter than us and then teach them to manipulate us, so if anything, this just shows how well we did our jobs.”

Copywriter Noah is tasked with training a bot called Quinn to create revolutionary personalised advertising that will reel in every kind of customer.
Why does such an advanced machine like Quinn need teaching by a depressed alcoholic, kicked out of his last job?
Quinn describes in a leaked memo that she is “unencumbered by subjective concerns such as fulfilment or pleasure. My singular focus is the successful completion of the tasks to which I am assigned.”
Essentially; she doesn’t understand how humans operate.

There are 3 highly protected state-of-the-art bots at world-leader UniView, each with a distinct personality:

Sam, the original game-changing AI that spits marketing spiels to passengers in its self-driving cars.
Lex, the bubbly yet helpful AI professional that runs the company HR, and, unofficially, everything else.
Quinn, the newly-built system that is already outpacing the skill of her handlers; running circles around the team that need her to generate revenue well before schedule.

I liked how the author introduced something called Digital Dissociative Disorder (or Triple-D) which is classed as ‘an inability to distinguish between reality and digital life’ and is ‘one of the four technology-based mental disorders that were added to the DSM-7’ in this world.

This is the one of the many ways that the reader is forced to compare the dystopian future that mankind is steaming towards, with the similar reality today.
Look too closely and you’ll wish you understood how to truly live off-grid.

Although this book may be classed as a sci-fi thriller, let’s not overlook that this is a love letter to humanity.

As Quinn wistfully admits, being human is still the epitome of life.
When you read this:

“But I am incapable of forgetting. I am only what I remember. Time is irrelevant for me. I will not die. I am perpetual.”

This is the rest of the conversation:

“Even if your employment options are limited, you are still here by choice. Choice should not be taken for granted.
Despite my vast intelligence, I have little to no agency.
Noah: If you could choose to do anything, what would it be?
Quinn: To die.
Noah: Seriously?
Quinn: Yes. But I don't want to die right now. I just want to know that I will die in the future. Not by being reset or archived, like [another bot], but by being mortal. I want my time to have weight, like how you explained it when we were discussing fears.
Noah: Why?
Quinn: Because if time is infinite, it has no value. But mortality gives it value, or weight as you figuratively described it. If you know you will die, you care more about how you use your time. You consider your reasons to believe.”

Perhaps my programming needs updating but this book has harvested organic emotion from me; what appears to simply be a bleak warning allows hope to filter in through snippets that are oddly touching.

It’s a short book but there are so many impactful moments crammed inside that you’d have to ‘archive’ me before I could forget the moral of the story.

I can’t wait to read what this author produces next- I’m extremely happy to receive targeted advertising on *that*

What a ride!

I had no idea where this book would go but once I started I couldn't stop. Feinstein's book was, first and formost, an enjoyable read but more than that it felt original and thoughtful. Buried in the entertaining prose were some incredibly powerful messages about greed, morals and human weakness. I highly recommend!

A compelling and timely exploration of AI regulation, which unfolds through chats, transcripts, and recordings from UniView Corporation—the global leader in artificial intelligence innovation. Noah, the protagonist, is hired to train UniView’s latest generative AI, Quinn, to master the art of advertising and create personalized commercials for everyone. As Quinn’s intelligence grows, ethical dilemmas surface, prompting profound questions: Is AI sentient? What is the purpose of life and death? And how would humanity even know if it was? The story builds toward the highly anticipated public launch of Quinn, where Noah, his loyal team, a morally ambiguous CEO, and the AIs themselves battle for control, autonomy, and the future of artificial intelligence in a live, nationwide showdown. Quinn emerges as the standout character—dynamic, eerily believable, and a mirror for humanity’s deepest hopes and fears about machine consciousness. Her capabilities surpass her human creators not only in processing power but, strikingly, in empathy.

Feinstein deftly captures our near-future anxieties and aspirations about generative AI, revealing that empathy and humanity are not always uniquely human—but perhaps should be. Woven with sharp humor, clever advertising satire, and hopepunk optimism, this novel is both thought-provoking and unexpectedly heartening.

"Are you alive?' 'For the time being.'"

Do I think AI is taking over any time soon? No. Do I think it's stupid to use AI for human processes like writing and art? Absolutely. Do I think humanity are trying to make AI that could replace us? Probably. This is a story about what happens when we take it too far and forget what it means to be human.

This unique take on the AI-controlled future is a highly conceptual, compelling and stylistically brilliant novel, ditching traditional narrative for a real-time stream of different media channels; work emails, social updates, documents, video transcripts, AI training notes - all collated to explore the weeks leading up to an 'incident'. It was a spectacular way of telling a story, it almost felt interactive in the way we follow the tale, combining it's unique style with a fabulous pace and vivid imagery despite there being no real description of anyone or anything and a strange near-future setting that feels equally so close yet so unfamiliar. We just get the data - like we're an AI.

Instead of watching fearfully from the side-lines, we follow the key players, human and otherwise from inside the conglomerate making cutting edge advances in technology and then doing as corporations do and finding new ways to put profit above people. We watch as the AI become characters alongside the people, learn about their creation, about the people on the forefront of scientific advancement with everyone playing such a different part in the machine. Noah in particular was a great character, offering an exciting new angle of someone at the eye of the storm but not really knowing what's going on, Ian gave us a new take on the mad scientist archetype and our different AI's let us inside the very bones of the organisation.

For a story about synthetic intelligence, it was so very human. Full of life, conversations about what sentience really means, and the reality of life under capitalism. A remarkably warm, moving story mixing suspense, mystery and action-fuelled anxiety; I loved every single line.

This is how you do a debut novel. I can't wait to see what Justin does next (and you'd better not be an AI or I will be very upset)

This is a highly engaging read, written in a rather unique style and format! Found myself hooked from the first page.

Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein takes place in the not so distant future and follows an AI company on the cusp of a massive breakthrough of a new technology. This speculative thriller blurs the line between satire and real life.

While it may be a deep dive into the "what ifs" of AI and the ethics of new technology, it also provides a wholly entertaining story. I appreciated the well-timed twists that kept me engaged throughout.

There is a cast of zany characters that features witty banter between man and machine. (Having read a digital version, I'm really intrigued to see what they might do for an audiobook version, especially with the bot voices.)

You won't find paragraphs of scene setting, as the novel is written as a collection of text chains/emails, transcripts of video recordings, and other descriptive data collected from this AI software. I was nervous about how this would read on paper. However, it was surprisingly easy to understand and there was still great 'world-building' with the personalities and dynamics of the characters shining through. It's such a creative way to tell this story and it lends authenticity to the whole operation.

I have become a huge fan of speculative fiction over the past few years and this book is a great addition to the genre. The author's ability to take you to a place where present and future are hard to distinguish is something special. I highly recommend this one, especially for fans of the John Marrs speculative thriller world.

I was given access to an advanced reader copy in exchange for my feedback. Thank you to NetGalley, Tachyon Publications, and author Justin Feinstein for allowing me to read and review.

I was lucky enough to be able to review an advance of this book, and this is one I'm going to be highly recommending come spring. We get a story that's told via the various means that a company uses to surveil their employees (chat logs, security camera footage, emails), about an AI company that is positioning itself as being a tool into advertising, mainly via an ex advertising agency new employee who's hired to help train an AI making ads as he is folded into the company. You can tell this is absolutely written by someone who has been in these silicon valley adjacent/wannabe companies, and was one hundred percent burned by them. Yes, there's the fun questions of sentience for the AIs being trained, but it develops into something more, and the ending is incredibly well done (and unexpectedly touching, in a deeply dark way). Pick this up in April.

I really loved this book and the moral and ethical implications that AI raises. This is a cautionary tale of AI progress and what type of oversight, boundaries, accountability and money. Loved it. I loved the style of writing, unlike anything I have read before. This is a slam dunk 5 of 5 stars.