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| Published: 2021 Acquired: July 2021 Read: August 2021 |
Sarah Pinsker is one of my favorite writers of short sf&f, but this is the first of her novels (she has written two now) that I have picked up. It's set in the near future, and weaves in perspectives from four different family members on the Pilot, a brain implant that allows people to multitask. Of the two parents, one wants it for work and the other wants no part of it; of the two children, one gets it but it never works quite right, and the other can't have it because she is seizure-prone.
Pinsker does a great a job inhabiting the third-person limited perspective of all four characters, and her skill as a short-story writer really comes through here in the way that the very short chapters always end at just the right moment, a sharp line of emotional observation that recasts what has gone before in the scene. Since I have become a parent, books about parents have struck me differently; it's not so much reading about kids in danger (as I know some people say, such as my wife), but parents trying to figure out what is right for their kids. I got very anxious reading the scenes of Val and Julie trying to make these decisions. Pinsker is quite skilled at depicting people making bad choices for bad reasons while making it totally understandable, something she has in common with one of my favorite writers, George Eliot. Val and Julie want to be good parents and good spouses, but just like all of us, they do not always succeed.
I do have some quibbles. I would have liked to have seen more of the wider social impacts of the Pilot technology; specifically, it bothered me that there were only Pilots. I felt certain that such a technology would inspire a raft of imitators, which would bring its own problems that would fit well into Pinsker's story. Second, why does each chapter have the name of the viewpoint character up top? I can tell who it is by reading!
But overall, this is great. I was liking it all along, but I knew it had won me over when the end of one chapter made me cry, not just little tears, but being on the verge of sobbing! Maybe I am a soft touch, but hey, touching us is what fiction is supposed to do.
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