When the Cassidy-Shaws' autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver's seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret, implicating them each in the accident. During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie's future.
For all its eerie timeliness, Culpability should age better than yesterday’s Instagram post. Holsinger, a medievalist at the University of Virginia, has a sharp eye for the eternal values and foibles that animate human affairs ... Not to say it’s didactic, only that it presents deep ethical questions about fault and responsibility. It’s also an irresistibly anxious book ... If you want an engaging novel sure to spark great discussion about...thorny future, this is it.
Holsinger...ratchets the stakes even higher, pushing us to the brink of incredulity. It’s as though he was hellbent on delivering a Book That Will Make You Think when an old-fashioned domestic drama would have sufficed. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but in this case we lose some emotional depth to philosophical questions (albeit important ones) ... To Holsinger’s credit...answers are nuanced. He peppers his novel with snippets of magazine articles, research papers and text messages ... Elements like these can be a distraction in a novel; here, they provide texture, moving the narrative forward and gently educating readers about the potential and pitfalls of newfangled technology.
Dizzying questions ... Complicated and compelling ... A family drama and a thriller, a heartwrenching emotional story and a meditation on our digital age. It’s the kind of novel I love to recommend because it will appeal to every kind of reader.
