I read this novel as an ARC from Netgalley.

You can tell this novel is written by a woman, and I mean this in a very good way. Almost from the moment we meet our heroines. Marti and Emma, the ethical implications of building an android are brought up and discussed. It’s not tedious. This is a comic novel, but it’s also one where the morality of creating a living being is considered. Which is very often missing from the discourse when our modern tech bros create either a human-like automaton or an AI. You have only to watch the videos of male engineers and scientists torturing their robots, or watch Grok start calling itself “mechaHitler” to realize how seriously the ethics of creation should be considered.

This makes it sound like a heavy and philosophical book, which it absolutely is not. It’s much more a comic rom-com romp through modern dating and its shortfalls. Which leads our heroines to conspire to create a “sexbot”, dubbed Bob. And as the AI, in particular, becomes more and more sentient, their kindness and compassion toward it make something very different than “mechaHitler.”

It's this light and contemporary touch that makes this book a very fun read. The voices of our main characters, including Bob, are distinct, and you feel like you really know them as you go along for the ride. And great lines like “In a rare miscalculation, Emma had put too much faith in math” are plentiful throughout.

If you’re looking for some fun near-future science fiction with fairly low stakes while being really, really smart, this is the book for you.