WHO KNOWS YOU BY HEART, layered storytelling...in the Satanic second person

WHO KNOWS YOU BY HEART
C.J. FARLEY
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Part social thriller, part modern love story, Who Knows You by Heart is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what’s real in an age of artificial intelligence.

Octavia Crenshaw, a Jamaican-American coder living in Manhattan, is broke, burned out, and haunted by her parents’ deaths. Desperate to pay off some debts, she ditches her nonprofit job for a high-paying gig at Eustachian Inc., a Big Tech company that specializes in audio entertainment. Language, communication, human connection—these are the markets Eustachian wants to revolutionize...and dominate.

Octavia finds herself swept up in the world of the Tech Titans, with its lure of instant riches and its seemingly limitless future. But as one of Eustachian’s very few Black employees, Octavia is uncomfortably aware of things that seem to escape her unexplained tech glitches, cryptic remarks, a mysterious secret floor in the corporation’s gleaming headquarters.

But she sets her suspicions aside when she’s recruited by another Black coder—the infuriating but attractive Walcott—to collaborate on a secret project code-named Zion. Zion is a new kind of AI-powered storytelling, one that’s programmed to be free from the racist and sexist biases that plague other AI products. Zion could launch Eustachian into a bold new future and make its developers super rich while righting all kinds of injustices. Octavia and Walcott’s excitement over their creation sets off romantic sparks between the two of them, until they discover a toxic secret about their employer—something that they can’t unlearn, or overlook, but must overcome.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Told in second person, so no possibility for anything above four of five stars exists. A Columbia educated (as we're reminded often) Black woman succumbs to the lure of tech money in this romance-tinged technothriller. It's very much a game of two halves, as the beginning sets up the circumstances of Octavia's decision to accept cold capitalist reality and take a high-paying, not likely to be fulfilling job in order to buy her way out of debt...much of which was inherited from her mother, thus involving Octavia in debt peonage.Fortunately for her a megacompany, Eustachian, Inc.'s, testing algorithm taps her as A Talent.

As witty, obsevant Octavia spends time in Eustachian, Inc., we get the deeply uneasy sense of "offness" that a thriller needs to make it exciting. The author chooses to make this a very extended part of the book, not igniting the thriller part until Walcott, the love interest/cospirator with excellent aims, appears far too near the halfway point. This is also when the language shifts registers as technobabble (for all of me, anyway) predominates from here on out. I perked up, though, because the stated aim of these two Black folks in a lily-white tech company staffed by tech bros is to subvert the systemic racism and misogyny from within using coding skills.

As this is exactly what I think keeps Aynholes awake at night and causes them to refuse DEI anything with all their might, I was so down with this! Especially since I was being tenderized by the (for white people) immersion into Black culture, use of Black contributions to the world, and centering of a Black woman in a plot about confronting and subverting racism and misogyny.

You'll have noticed the incomplete fourth star. I was a bit surprised by Author Farley's complete absence of Asian characters in a novel centering race-based prejudice. Historical reckoning with racism and combating is perpetuation is very much incomplete without more inclusion. Still, It's not fatal as flaws go, nowhere near as guaranteed to put me off as Satanic second-person narration.

I would've relegated this novel to a short review until I got to the final chapter. A summation of the extreme dangers inherent in AI's development *at*all* left me slightly winded from the emotional ooof as the gut-punch landed.

For that alone I hope you'll read the book. (I won't forgive the second-personning waterboard torture, though.)