When Abbie wakes up, she’s not sure where she is or what happened. She’s laying down in a room with machines, so she thinks she must be in a hospital. She must have been in some sort of accident. Her husband Tim is there beside her. He doesn’t want to tell her at first what happened, but she keeps asking him. Finally he relents. She wasn’t in an accident. She’s not in a hospital.
She’s a robot. Technically, a cobot, a companion robot with artificial intelligence. Tim, a tech genius and owner of a company that had been developing robots for many years, has figured out a way to download all of Abbie’s social media and texts into an artificial brain, so that the AI could become a new version of her, to replace the real Abbie who had gone missing five years previous.
Tim takes cobot Abbie home, to the home where he had lived with the real Abbie, to let her get accustomed to her new reality for a few weeks. It’s here that she meets, Danny again, now 5 years older. Abbie had been alive when he’d been diagnosed with Heller’s syndrome, or childhood degenerative disorder. But she’s been gone for five years. Danny is five years older, but still locked in the developmental disorder that took him over.
A lot had happened in the years since Abbie had disappeared—Tim had been investigated, and later exonerated, as her killer. His company had continued to do research into AI, clearly, her existence proves that. Danny has been in a school that offers therapy for kids like him. And cobot Abbie is expected to adjust to her new reality.
Abbie sorts through the memories she has, of bring an artist who borrowed from tech culture in her sculptures. She remembers her early days as an artist-in-residence at Tim’s company, trying to help the engineers see things more deeply. She goes through Abbie’s books and looks at her art pieces, thinking back through her relationship with Tim. Wondering what went wrong.
But as she’s trying to put together what happened to Abbie, she realizes that there is a present danger in her family’s life. As an AI, she makes many people uncomfortable, but she also understands that she can use that to her advantage. And she’ll need every advantage she can get to figure out where the real Abbie is and to make sure she and Danny can stay safe.
The Perfect Wife is a crazy story of a family in crisis mixed with a tech thriller. Author JP Delaney has packed this novel with surprises. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, he pulls the rug out from under you and you see that the story you thought you were reading is going in a completely different direction. Suddenly, it’s a completely different story, and you’re running to catch up.
I listened to the audio version of this. Narrators Saskia Maarleveld, Graham Halstead, and Euan Morton tell the story in alternating chapters. We get inside cobot Abbie’s head in most of the chapters, but other chapters tell what was happening from the perspective of an insider in Tim’s company. We get the present and the past in different voices, and it helps you stay present in the story despite all the twists. I can’t really explain this without giving too much away, but I want to say that my favorite surprise came through in the audio in a way it didn’t in the written book. For that reason, I definitely recommend this as an audio book. Plus, the narrators are just really good, especially Ms. Maarleveld, who has to convince listeners she is human and not entirely human at the same time. It’s a fascinating performance.
I did find myself bristling at the use of the word “autism.” Author Delaney uses it interchangeably with Heller’s syndrome and childhood degenerative disorder, and it’s said that those with autism lack empathy. I realize that the author does have some personal experience with a child on the autistic spectrum, but I feel like the idea of a spectrum got lost in this story. It was fine when they were specifically talking about Danny, but there were a lot of generalizations that I felt were unfair to many on the autistic spectrum.
Aside from that, I did enjoy this story and the various twists. Watching cobot Abbie go through all the things she had to go through to put the pieces together was fascinating, and it was just quite a ride!
Egalleys for The Perfect Wife were provided by Ballentine Books through NetGalley, with many thanks, but I bought the audio book myself through Audible.
