In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called 'hums,' May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family's debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance. Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family's addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights' respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be.
Intense and propulsive ... Reads like a work of beautifully observed contemporary realism, an intimate and tender portrait of one mother’s day-to-day struggles to keep her children safe, and to find a little joy, in a damaged and dangerous world ... This sleek ride of a novel further cements Phillips’s position as one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction.
Phillips specializes in imparting a gentle shimmer of uncanniness to the intimacies of domestic realism ... The book shrewdly connects maternal guilt to consumerism ... Phillips keeps her world just one degree shy of recognizability, deftly turning the dials of similarity and difference, a mechanic fine-tuning eeriness instead of car engines ... Nimble.
Another reason that the stakes don’t feel quite as large as they could be is that the concept of being unrecognizable quickly loses its purchase ... Here’s the final turn of the superfluity screw: even in her vaunted facelessness, May has become supremely legible.
