A review by nuevecuervos
Barren Cove by Ariel S. Winter

3.0

I read this book in the space of just a couple of hours, and while I was expecting a story about Sapien, it was more a sordid tale of the residents of Barren Cove, told by the house computer to Sapien, and only experienced briefly by him. Imagine your standard tell-all about the quirks of odd, bored, inbred, rich families whose only problems seem to stem from the ones they inflict on themselves and each other, only the characters are (mostly) post-human robots who for all of their disdain for humans, act just like them. It was fun, but it was modeled as trash candy for the futurist set, and I would assume that was done with the intent of making a reader think about the implications of sentient life repeating the same patterns with which humans have struggled for roughly ever. The story features an abused, timid lives-for-everyone-but-herself doormat sister bot, the domineering, jealous, hateful asshole brother bot, the benign patriarch whose blind eye for his children's shortcomings makes him about the least benign of all of the bots, the human who's taken in and also becomes a weird, domineering asshole who can't admit help and uses sister bot just as thoroughly as everyone else, and the fucked up partying son bot who has feelings he can't admit because he'd rather be a rebel and a robot supremacist, and frankly feelings just haven't served him terribly well in the past. Oh, and Sapien, who is like WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE MOTHERFUCKERS... I gotsta hack their computer and get ALL their dirt, and also who is that hot young babe with the pink hair and can I get with her pleeeease. So, standard dirty old hippie man bot.

Anyway. Entertaining, but probably not something I'd revisit. Recommended for the speculative fiction fans who want to know what daytime drama would look like in a post-human time.