43-year-old Dolores O'Shea is logical, organized, and prepared to handle whatever comes her way. She keeps up with her job and housework, takes care of her mentally declining mother, and remains close with her old friends and her younger sister who's moved to New York. Though her marriage with David, an anesthesiologist, isn't what is used to be, nothing can quite prepare her for Zoey, the $8,000 AI sex doll that David has secretly purchased and stuffed away in the garage.
In a way, Crossan has painted herself into a corner here. In Dolores she has created a character with trauma who barely acknowledges that trauma even to herself. We might expect such a character to expose their pain, deal with it and emerge a wiser and happier person. But if an author rejects this "healing journey" trope as being too cliched, she is left with limited options ... Crossan’s style reflects the content. Dolores’s first-person narration is written in flat, affectless prose, with short sentences that give little away ... The astute reader may well guess this secret within the first 50 pages, but piecing together the events that formed Dolores’s ultra-avoidant character is still fairly enjoyable.
A darkly comic, wholly original novel ... A timely read, sure to appeal to book groups that enjoy the work of Gary Shteyngart, Ottessa Moshfegh, or Dave Eggers.
