The unseen world liz moore
I stumbled onto this book almost by accident, proof that the most potent recommendations still approach from people we “know,” or at least feel some connection with. The author, Liz Moore, and I have some Boston author friends in common, and as soon as I started reading, the setting felt familiar—even though I’ve never actually been to Dorchester.
(And since this is my first book review in 2017, feel free to allow me know how well I follow my own recommendations for writing book reviews.)
The story itself is about a brilliant unpartnered father who runs a lab and educates his daughter, Ada, by bringing her to labor. My brother worked in a very similar lab in the ahead 1980s, when the book begins, and even as I devoured the fictional story I was remembering his real life life. The extra layer kept pulling me away to wonder where fiction and history intersected, but the words on the page kept pulling me back—proof of a subtle but consistent structure that framed what could’ve been a very disjointed tale into a great story.
When David, Ada’s father, loses his brilliance to Alzheimer’s, he leaves behind a history so complicated that it takes Ada the entire novel to work out what really
In sparse, urgent prose, Liz Moore delivers a staggeringly beautiful meditation on love, legacy, and the emotional necessities that make being worth living. That lump in your throat? You won’t quite know how it got there?nor believe how long it will stick around once the terminal page is turned.
Tea Obreht, composer of The Tiger's Wife
I was so thoroughly engaged with The Unseen World. What a superb, fulfilling, riveting read, alive with complex characters, a thrilling story, wit, and, above all, a deep sense of compassion.
Jami Attenberg, author of Saint Mazie
Fiercely intelligent....Moore evocatively renders the remoteness of even our closest loved ones
New York Times Book Review
A cerebral, page-turning thriller … an sophisticated and ethereal novel about persona and the dawn of man-made intelligence, and a convincing interior portrait of a young woman.
Washington Post
[A] captivating page-turner … a wry, gentle coming-of-age story and an intriguing glimpse into the development of artificial intelligence and virtual reality … It is also an incisive, insightful, and compassionate examination of the complexities of family and identity
Boston GThe Unseen World
Liz Moore. Norton, $26.95 (448p) ISBN 978-0-393-24168-6
In her third novel, Moore (Heft) delivers a striking examination of family, memory, and technology. Leaping from the 1980s to the early 2000s, this is the story of young Ada Sibelius and her brilliant computer scientist father, David, who runs a lab at a prestigious college in Boston, working to develop a lifelike artificial intelligence program, ELIXIR. Ada is being raised nontraditionally—educated by David and his lab colleagues, treated as one of the team, without kid gloves—but when David begins showing signs of Alzheimer’s, her life is upended. She is sent to a local junior high school, where she is forced to interact with children her own age, and when David can no longer remain unsupervised, she is taken in by Diana Liston, David’s closest associate. Moore’s exploration of David’s decline is remarkable and heartbreaking, and she shifts gears deftly as the story is complicated further: when Liston tries to become Ada’s legal guardian, questions about David’s identity arise. Since David can no longer answer for himself, Ada takes charge and tries to unravel her father’s cryptic past, leading to t
Review: The Unseen World by Liz Moore
The Unseen World is Liz Moore’s beautifully written coming-of-age novel of Ada Sibelius. Ada is the daughter of David Sibelius, a pioneering researcher in false intelligence during the early 1980s. David is the director of a computer science laboratory at the fictional Boston Institute of Technology, or “The Bit” as it is affectionately known.
Ada is named after Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, who is generally acknowledged as the first programmer—she programmed Charles Babbage’s mechanical desktop and also published the first algorithm. Lady Lovelace was one of the most famous female mathematicians of the 19th century.
Ada Sibelius is homeschooled by her genius father, spending each morning as a member of his research lab among the graduate students and other researchers. She is especially close with Diana Liston (known simply as “Liston”) who is David’s second-in-command at the lab.
David is a quirky but responsible father, that is, until his mind starts to fail with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Ada has no other family and must rely on Liston to navigate these most difficult years of her life.
Ada also has a ally in ELI
Unfinished Read: The Unseen World
Author: Liz Moore
Release Date: July 26, 2016
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Source: Publisher
Genre(s): Science fiction; fiction
Review Spoilers: mediumAmazon | Goodreads
I really wanted to like this book; unfortunately, I just couldn’t finish it.The Unseen World is a story about a little girl, Ada, who lives with her computer scientist father. Growing up steeped in MIT lab culture, Ada is precocious and wildly intelligent, but she has difficulty relating to her peers in social situations. Her father succumbs to Alzheimer’s when Ada is young, and the rest of the manual I read involves her coping with the loss of her quirky, brilliant father’s mind and learning about the mysterious man-made intelligence system he left behind.
I thought I would enjoy this book because I like reading mysteries and I spent most of my college years functional in a science research lab. Reading about lab culture in this book felt authentic to my experiences, and seeing the world through Ada’s young scientist eyes felt natural.
Unfortunately, the pace of this novel was ploddingly slow and filled with overly descriptive paragraphs with very li