TITAN’S TEARS

In the near future, Belle is an aimless, unemployed 30-year-old woman living in an Alaskan village. When she receives a job offer from “the world’s premier tech company,” Eccleston Evolution, she’s quite surprised. Its founder, Sophia Eccleston, is a notoriously abrasive person in her 70s who, thanks to advances in technology, doesn’t look a day over 20. She wants Belle to work as a nanny for her sightless, 8-year-old daughter, Juno. Belle will live at the company’s secluded headquarters in Alaska. The site contains animals that were once extinct but were brought back to life with technology that uses DNA extracted from fossils (although none of them are dinosaurs, à la Michael Crichton’s 1990 thriller Jurassic Park). Meanwhile, an aggressive businessman, Lucas Ivanov, is planning a hostile takeover of Eccleston Evolution. In yet another plotline, a man named Seth Johnson, whose wife was cryogenically frozen by Eccleston prior to her death, is facing financial hardship as he struggles to pay Eccleston to keep his spouse alive. He starts to lose his grip, and he’s committed to a mental hospital before later embarking on a rescue mission. The early pages of Lester’s novel very effectively draw readers in; different aspects of the near-future world are revealed, and questions arise about Eccleston Evolution, which also has a hand in humanoid robotics technology. The plot thickens when it turns out that Juno may be much more than she seems. The book also has quite bit of business talk, however; the discussions surrounding the possible takeover of Eccleston aren’t particularly compelling, since readers have little reason to care about either Eccleston or Ivanov as characters. (Ivanov is notably described as someone who “buys what he can’t create.”) Still, the novel does have some surprises, particularly in the later pages, which feature disturbing discoveries.