This near-future story of a mother struggling to cope with a society under constant surveillance (your phone knows you're pregnant before you do) might sound like a cautionary tale, yet we now live in a very similar environment. This novel will appeal to a wide range of readers because it is so well written and wonderfully plotted.

I surprised myself by liking this as it is not my usual genre. The author has a flowing, compelling style which sweeps you along in this dystopian world she has created. The world is based on events in the here and now, cleverly woven into the plot (as she chronicles at the end of the book). There are shades of Big Brother and The Truman Show. The main character, May, is trying to do the best for her family after losing her job working to improve AI functioning. but makes lots of mistakes. Jem, her husband, a sort of odd-job man, is a weak character who hardly features. The children are rather annoying - demanding and rather whiny. I thought the end was a little puzzling I wasn't sure what was happening, but all in all a good read and a scary vision of the future if we don't get pollution, climate change and AI under control. Not to forget over-reliance on phones and other devices. Thank you to NetGalley for my free review copy.

This was a quick read but made me think a lot about how technology is invading every moment of our lives, or at least working towards that. To go anywhere without a cellphone is just not done anymore because they hold all the important info. Hum brings this point home to the extreme, with even little kids strapping "bunnies" to their wrists that tracks them and listens and entertains the kids, especially when they are in their wooms. I could really understand May, who came into a bit of money after agreeing to the face distortion surgery, trying to give her kids the experience she had growing up where there was still trees and good outside. That part felt nicely nostalgic but also sad because the good outdoors is only found in certain shielded areas. But even that paradise had hidden dangers and was only a facade, and after when the experience went viral and May was bombarded with all that hate, I could see that being so true, even more than it is now. That was a scary thought. So, this was an interesting read though a bit uncomfortable because of how likely it could happen for real. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me a chance to read and review this book.

Hum By Helen Phillips I had to sleep on this one to give myself time to process my feelings about it. On one hand, I was immediately invested in the dystopian setting, the stylish prose and the lurching sense of recognition at where we are heading, given the foreboding that some of my generation and older experience regarding the effects that technology and AI are manifesting in our children and grandchildren. Phillips had me in the palm of her hand with every loaded sentence, with every allusion to the insidiousness of advertising and how casually we relinquish our privacy, with her not so unimaginable world of homogeny and instant gratification, consumption and disempowerment, our eschewing of close personal contact for devices and AI. I appreciate her hypothesis of future childhood, and that the irrepressible nature of children may dispel the notion that it's not worth bringing children into such a world, that where there's life, there's hope. But then there's the ending. I am not a reader who demands a logical ending. I'm okay with ambiguity or unexpectedness, but sometimes, (and I'm still thick about Bobby Ewing's shower renaissance), sometimes an ending makes the reader feel swindled. Until about 95% this was a 5 star read for me. On finishing it, it was a highly emotional and bitterly disappointed 2 stars. I just know that I will be thinking about elements of this story for years. Every time I grind my teeth over being denied access to a Web page or an app because I won't agree to their privacy or advertising rules, I will think about this book. Every time I see a baby in a pushchair glued to a device I will think about this book. Every time I look at a building development that was once a field or a woods I will think about this book. Every time I notice my decisions being influenced by how others might view me I will think of this book. But that ending. Publication date: 7th November 2024 Thanks to #NetGalley and #AtlanticBooks for providing an advance copy for review purposes

This is an engaging, dystopian story of parental love in a world of pervasive personal devices, surveillance and advertising, ravaged by the effects of climate change. At times it is disturbing, as it is so close to the bone; just a couple of small nudges away from our current reality. “In a hot and gritty city populated by super-intelligent robots called 'Hums', May seeks some reprieve from recent hardships and from her family's addiction to their devices. She splurges on a weekend away at the Botanical Garden - a rare, green refuge in the heart of the city, where forests, streams and animals flourish.” May and Jem have two young children, Lu and Sy, and the story revolves around May’s attempts to nurture them and keep them safe - desperately trying to provide them the rich experience that she had, detached from the omnipresent personal devices in her childhood world of greenery and forests that has long since burned. This is confounded by May and Jem’s lack of money: Jem is working in the gig economy, and May recently lost her job (taken by AI), and every step that May takes is monitored and judged by the ubiquitous devices and cameras. The wheels quickly come off May’s world when her children go missing, and her desperate attempts to keep her family together spiral out of her control and into the hands of faceless bureaucracy and hopes of benevolence from the surveillance state. The narrative has a slow, observational pace that I really liked, and that seemed to fit the mood perfectly - giving the story space to really show May’s place in the world, her relationship with Jem and the children, her hopes and desires. Lu and Sy are superbly observed as a 9 year old and her younger brother - their combinations of fun, cuddles, squabbles, laughter, innocence, imagination, petulance and love are perfectly drawn. May’s world revolves entirely around her family, and she has few friends and little interaction with other people. This gives a quite claustrophobic feel at times, but this really underscores the importance of their family bubble, and their isolation from society and the facelessness of bureaucracy. Overall, a perceptive, unsettling but gentle observation of the impact of intrusive advertising, constant surveillance, personal devices, and the anonymous judgement of others.