TandeWrites

When Augusta Pine was fifteen, she hacked a car’s autopilot and accidentally killed her first crush. She was given two options: spend twenty years in prison for manslaughter, or serve ten years as an undercover spy with no official existence. She chose the second. Now, eighteen-year-old Augusta’s family thinks she died in the car crash, and her only friends are her professional handler, Prefect, and a snarky sentient AI spybot called Edgar. She rents a room in a smart apartment complex on a rare weekend to herself and makes grand plans to do nothing but relax, until six cyberterrorists hack the building and imprison the residents. To save everyone, Augusta will have to rely on her wits and her own criminal skills to stay one step ahead of the killers. For the first time in her life, could it pay to not exist?

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Augusta Pine Does Not Exist is set in a near-future where physical IDs have been replaced by permanent biometric tattoos to combat identity theft. It’s about a lot of things: the lengths we go to for family, how technology is encroaching into our lives, how we recover from mistakes we’ve made, and, of course, a very snarky heroine. It also has a slightly sociopathic AI spy bot that looks like a bumblebee. And he is my favourite.

I will confess that I originally had my doubts about this book, and those doubts were definitely misplaced. I’ve read some of Emily Lloyd-Jones’ works in the past, but I’ve only read her Welsh myth retellings and not the books that came before that are more aligned with this current one, so I wasn’t sure what to expect or if what I loved about her writing in the Welsh books would translate to a different genre. But this book is clever, twisty, and surprisingly funny. I found it unputdownable at points: it’s fast-paced and compelling, and I would’ve happily stayed up all night to keep reading. There was never a lack of action. Some of the flashback scenes did take me out of the story, but I overall did enjoy the snippets of Augusta’s file and the cases she’s previously worked on to paint a more solid picture of this near-future world and what it took for Augusta to survive in her situation.

What I find to be the overarching message of this book (resisting the AI takeover) is more relevant than ever. There have been a lot of recent sci-fi and dystopian releases that take a firm anti-AI stance, and I’m interested in how many of them were conceived or drafted over five years ago, when the current state of technology was just fiction and dystopia rather than our reality. I also appreciated the exploration of moral complexity interwoven with the dilemmas of technological advancement: this technology is improving a lot of people’s lives, but at what cost?

If you’re looking for a quirky, quick-paced, and relatively lighthearted reverse spy heist, this one is for you. It’s currently a standalone, but I would be interested in more books featuring these characters and this universe, regardless of length.