I bought this book as part of a Tomely bundle, and I'm quite divided about it! To me, there are strong pros and cons, and they're so connected, it's a bit hard to know where to start. Perhaps first, the plot itself. It is strikingly contrived - a series of fortunate events for the protagonist leads him to a new girlfriend, a series of new jobs, and perhaps a new appreciation for life. Many plots pay their mortgage regularly to coincidence and accident, and there's no reason this should be a negative, but in my reading there were one too many things going right for Connor to really be believed. That said, he responded quite believably within the confines of his own character. Both our protagonist and the woman he's interested in (met, naturally, in a chance encounter in the first pages) are severely limited human beings. He, too distracted by streaming information and social connectedness to be actually connected - and blind to his own preoccupation. He's also driven by a serious ambition that he isn't aware of until it's a bit too late in the book for the reader to not have already decided how he or she feels about his dissatisfaction and restlessness - by the time the author explained why and how Connor wanted to succeed, I had already formed my own explanation, which made me like him even less. As for the love interest, again, she reacts extremely genuinely within the confines of her own limitations. K is the kind of person who won't tell her lover what she wants or what she cares about, and then hates him for not being able to read her mind. She preaches living in the moment and connecting with people, but she, too, is incapable of real sharing or connection and she, too, flits from one thing to the next. If you were supposed to actually like either of these people, I completely failed - I found them annoying and often hateful; but, that said, I also found them completely believable in how and who they were.

This is potentially an interesting read for people who like to think about approaches to technology, failed relationships, ambition, or chance. But I can't recommend it too highly because I found the contrivances limiting and the characters distasteful. ( )