Rating: WARTY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I got turned off this almost from the start, but pressed on because the topic interested me. In some ways it was reminiscent of the 1992 Al Pacino movie Simone, but whereas that was a simulation, Alice is a full AI. The book was still nowhere near as entertaining as the movie though. I skimmed bits and pieces and the more I read, the worse it got. A third of the way in I gave up on it completely.
Instead of focusing on the Alice character, which is what interested me, the author kept going off at tangents, playing virtual poker, playing a D&D type of game, launching an avatar into a virtual chat room, and all of that was tedious to me. The parts in which Alice was featured were more interesting but even those lacked something and felt repetitious at times. In the end I decided I have better things to do with my time than to pursue this when it was so consistently disappointing. I can't commend it based on what I read.
