Hum

May excelled at training AI until she "rendered herself obsolete." With two young children and a struggling husband, she makes the desperate decision to participate in an experiment, allowing her face to be surgically altered to confound surveillance cameras. A hum, a robot of fine motor skills and conversational fluency that veers continually into product pitches, performs the procedure. May and her family live in a scalded, polluted, thoroughly surveilled city in a calamitous, very near future. Though she should spend every painfully earned penny of her "face money" for food and rent, she longs for the lost forests of her childhood and a break from their ever-present devices. So she opts for a stay at the Botanical Gardens, the city's one verdant, if strictly controlled, refuge. T heir brief idyll seems as beneficial as May envisioned, until the children wander into trouble, the family's woes come under hostile viral scrutiny, and a hum investigates. With propulsive intensity and extraordinary finesse and insight, Phillips (The Need, 2019) keenly dramatizes the love and terror of parenthood in a poisoned, high-tech, yet not utterly hopeless world.

What happens when the forests are gone, surveillance cameras are ubiquitous, and AI-programmed robots do the work? Set in a future altered by climate change and technology that may feel uncomfortably close at hand, Phillips' new novel again shows her talent for finding warmth, humanity, and connection within an all-too-conceivable dystopian landscape. The action begins with May Webb, an unemployed mother of two elementary school students, undergoing a procedure designed to alter her features just enough to confound facial-recognition software. (The procedure is performed, as are many tasks in the world of the novel, by a robot with a soothing demeanor called a hum.) For surrendering her face to this experiment, May--whose AI-communication job has recently rendered itself obsolete and whose husband, Jem, has been laboring to keep the family financially afloat working gig-app-facilitated odd jobs--is paid the equivalent of 10 months of her previous salary. She immediately splurges on a three-night stay for the family in the idyllic Botanical Gardens, an accessible-only-to-the-rich paradise of greenery, frolicking animals, and fresh air walled off to shut out the city's grit, graffiti, litter, and soot. But the family's perfect vacation takes an unfortunate turn when the children wander off and get lost, setting in motion a string of events that endangers the family's power to stay together. Writing with precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion, Phillips renders the way love and family bonds--between partners, parents and children, and siblings--can act as a balm and an anchor amid the buffeting winds of a fast-changing, out-of-control world. A perceptive page-turner with a generous perspective on motherhood, identity, and the pitfalls of "progress." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.