Hess confronts technology’s distortions as they follow her through pregnancy and into her son’s early life. The result is a record of our digital age that reveals the unspoken ways our lives are being fractured and reconstituted by technology.
Spot-on and brutally funny ... As a member of the particularly online elite, Hess herself is also an expert of sorts, one I’ll gladly follow into the dense digital jungle. Yet she also smartly paints herself as just another willing victim of the internet ... Hess does all of this without sharing a drop of advice—hallelujah. Instead, she escorts readers on a wry tour of the buffet of options available to desperate new parents ... For all her button-pushing, Hess is never snarky or sentimental.
With wit, discernment and candor (sometimes too much candor), she captures the anxiety and weirdness of reproduction in our modern screen-based, app-oriented culture ... [Hess is] ...exceptionally skilled at noticing things worth seeing ... Early in the book—specifically the second half of page 32—she takes honesty too far, describing her bodily functions with such granular grubbiness as to leave the reader amazed and appalled. Anyone who skips those passages—and everyone should—will miss nothing important from this otherwise insightful and occasionally very funny look at, as the subtitle has it, 'having a child in the digital age.'
