True Life in Uncanny Valley
by Deb Caletti
High School    Labyrinth Road/Random    416 pp.
3/25    9780593708613    $19.99
e-book ed.  9780593708637    $10.99

Sixteen-year-old Eleanor is obsessed with learning all she can about her birth father, tech mogul Hugo Harrison, who ended his relationship with her mother long before Eleanor can remember. When the opportunity presents itself, she takes a summer job under an assumed name as a nanny for his two-year-old son, Arlo, and in the process gets to know Hugo’s young wife, Aurora. As Eleanor takes a front-row seat to a family she thought she knew all about from social media, readers may be less surprised than she is at how much isn’t what it seems; however, it’s easy to empathize with her wish to know her father and to believe the best of him. And Eleanor, who makes frequent, admiring reference to an early comic-book heroine named Miss Fury, becomes more heroic herself as she grows to question Hugo’s ethics in developing his AI projects, including his treatment of both Aurora and Arlo. Her questions are likely to prompt readers’ own about how to know what to believe, and about what makes AI (or anything else) go “from cool and interesting to creepy and disturbing.”

From the March/April 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.