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OMG! Wow!
This is an absolutely brilliant piece
of work and we’re still trying to process all the emotions it evoked in us.
It is a gentle, tender love story
between a long-discontinued-and-now-illegal robot, Sal and a highly-skilled
technician, Carla. In the world that Carla inhabits, creating sapient robots
with the ability to learn and transform behaviourally is illegal. However, sentient
beings that remain in the state that they were originally created are legal. Carla’s
new boss in Seattle recommends her to go to a tea shop, The Cybernetic Tea
Shop. Carla goes there and is shocked to find that it is run by a robot, Sal.
Sal is close to three hundred years old, so she was created before robots were
done away with, but lives facing isolation and hatred.
Sal is written so sensitively that we
had a drop of tear hanging at the edge of our eye throughout the book. This book
is an absolutely beautiful piece of art. While Sal is a robot, it is easy to
imagine what marginalised people could be feeling and experiencing in the face
of bigotry – like Sal.
The writer has created great people in
Sal, Carla and even Carla’s sentient hummingbird, Joanie.
Since this is sci-fi, it may not
interest everyone – but this book is for anyone who connects with emotions. It is
moving and touching.
We not only strongly recommend this
book, we actively exhort everyone to read it.
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