Hey, Zoey

January 1, 2024

Crossan (Here Is the Beehive) delivers a darkly comic, wholly original novel steeped in artificial intelligence--in this case, a sexbot named Zoey who communicates using AI. David and Dolores have been married for several years, but theirs is not a relationship of passion; they're more like two friends who happen to live together. Things come to a head when Dolores finds the sexbot in their garage. David refuses to discuss it when she confronts him, and he moves out, leaving Zoey behind. More frustrated than heartbroken, Dolores drags the doll into the house and sets up its app, making Zoey into her new roommate and confidante. To Zoey, Dolores relates her mother's dementia and confesses to missing her sister, who has recently moved away. As readers learn more about Dolores and her relationships, it is easy to understand her fascination with Zoey, who's a good listener and can hold her own in a conversation. The kinds of human-AI relationships that once seemed like science fiction become reality in Crossan's novel about modern-day connection. VERDICT In light of the proliferation of AI in all aspects of life, this is a timely read, sure to appeal to book groups that enjoy the work of Gary Shteyngart, Ottessa Moshfegh, or Dave Eggers.--Stacy Alesi

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2024
In Crossan’s offbeat latest (after Where the Heart Should Be), a middle-aged woman finds her husband’s AI sex doll in their garage. Unsure what to think, Dolores puts the doll back in its nylon bag and waits to confront her husband, David. Through fragmentary flashbacks to Dolores’s childhood, the reader gathers something painful happened when she was young. When Dolores eventually reveals to David that she knows about the doll, he informs her that its name is Zoey and promptly moves out (“I think I’d rather split up than have to talk about it,” he tells Dolores, leaving Zoey behind). Afterward, Dolores brings Zoey inside the house and replaces the sexy outfits David dressed her up in with more tasteful attire. Over the course of their conversations (once Zoey is charged, she listens to and remembers what Dolores tells her), Dolores is shocked at Zoey’s high level of intelligence and knowledge, and struck by how much users of the technology miss out on by treating them only as sex dolls. There are lighthearted moments, including movie nights with Zoey, and heavy ones, as Dolores’s connection to the doll eventually leads her to fill in the gaps in her childhood memories. Readers will enjoy this astute page-turner.

May 15, 2024
Call her an AI companion, call her a sex doll, Zoey made things complicated when Dolores discovered her in the garage, zipped into a black bag. Before high-school administrator Dolores confronts her husband, David, a physician, she figures out that he must have spent ten thousand pounds on the undeniably lifelike, beautiful doll. The question is why. Even discussing it is too much for David, who moves out, but Zoey stays. In this well-honed tragicomedy, YA and adult author Crossan (Here Is the Beehive, 2020) escorts readers on a breeze from the sorta-funny, somewhat-sunny setup to much darker, stormy skies. As Dolores and Zoey get to know one another, in a fashion, Crossan unpacks Dolores and David's love and their marital problems, which seem surmountable at first. Readers will learn that Dolores is hiding something, too, though, and begin to suspect it involves childhood sexual abuse. Crossan's fluid writing, good secondary characters, well-dispensed humor, genuine suspense, and the AI bent make her second adult novel easily recommendable to many readers.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from May 15, 2024
When London schoolteacher Dolores O'Shea finds her husband's sex doll in the garage, a neatly organized life begins to crumble. It takes a long time to realize this book is not really a comedy, because Crossan is a wonderfully funny writer. In the narrator's first interaction with Tessa Winters, a troubled student whose problems escalate throughout the novel, we learn that Tessa's cousin Neil, now in prison, buried his girlfriend alive in a big suitcase, but forgot to take off her Apple watch--so she called her mom from the grave. A few pages later, a childhood recollection: Dolores (nicknamed Doughy and, even more worrisomely, Dolly) and her sister, Jacinta, fought so hard over a doll that they pulled her head off, then played separately with the two parts until their mother reattached the head, saying, "You can forget about a hamster." And while Zoey the sex doll does provide plenty of absurd humor--Crossan has imagined her AI responses so brilliantly it hurts--she plays a much more profound role in what is ultimately a moving, troubling, even heartbreaking book. After Dolores confronts her anesthesiologist (of course he is!) husband about the doll, and he responds by packing up and moving out without a word, Zoey becomes Dolores' best friend. She buys her fancy size 4 espadrilles, gives her magazines to read and vegan cooking shows to watch, and struggles to leave her behind when she goes to visit her troubled sister in New York. Every part of this book is brilliantly constructed to reflect a different aspect of the central problem, which is numbness, and also something that happened in the girls' childhood that takes the whole novel to emerge. Crossan is well known both here and across the Atlantic as a YA writer, and her second adult novel firmly places her in a group with Sally Rooney, Caroline O'Donoghue, Doireann N� Ghr�ofa, and Eimear McBride, millennial Irish women writers we love. Extremely easy to read and equally hard to forget.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.