All I kept yelling was TALK TO A LAWYER.

I didn't ultimately like this book enough for 5 stars but the concept of a MASH app is super intruiging, gotta say. Reading the blurb dredged up memories from afternoons spent killing time in the little gym of my old elementary school, like that is a deep cut. Anyways um that is really cool because I have participated in questionaire-based dating thingies and I never felt like I had much to talk about with the people I matched with, but I always wondered where the algorithm was coming from. Like maybe they just needed to pair some people off or maybe we actually shared deeply similar values and experiences, it's hard to tell from a superficial interaction where I'm not exactly about to ask how someone I'm already not especially clicking with feels about like families or politics or whatever just for the sake of intellectual curiosity. But it's kind of cool that with this hypothetical MASH app the output is deeper than just spitting out names, but it also comes up with a future career, location, and number of future children. That kind of is a neat talking point like what did you get? How do you feel about it? Why do you think it decided that about you? I mean it's the same way I think about algorithms when it comes to like book recs are an example actually. When a book is marketed as for fans of x and y where x and y are very different things, if I've read them both I can be like lmao their one overlap is a cheating plot (hello Sarah Mlynowski, this reader never forgets). Just for example. Recs and comps aren't that helpful unless you can see what angle they're coming at it from. Like I wouldn't want to be paired with someone because we both like the same pizza toppings or something, that is like the easiest compromise in the world and not exactly the basis for a relationship. Which I think this book really got at which is cool.

But as someone with experience existing in this world, I've never trusted that goodreads is gonna put good books into my recommended bar or that a free dating app is gonna recommend me my soulmate (btw I def don't believe in soulmates but that's beside the point), and I find it hard to believe that in this fictional universe that's essentially what most people did? I also find it hard to believe that a girl who seemingly spent months and years being a tech and behavioural science prodigy hasn't also been inundated with replicability crisis in psychology and AI is racist discourse. No matter how hard we try to create unbiased tools, human bias is always present, we cannot escape it (though we should try), and hopefully the ones creating the tools should be the least likely to fall for it. But anyways, I'm old now, I need to cut this high school senior some slack.

The book did go into how, you know, even if the app was 100% accurate at predicting real futures, it's one thing to make the decision to like "sell out" or whatever years down the line knowing it is the best choice for your family or something, and another thing to learn at 15 that you will definitely never achieve your dreams. That actually does sound damaging and unhelpful and cuts out everything we learn along the way. But do I really think that this fictional app would actually ruin all those kids' lives the way it's depicted in the book? I hope not, I think we're more resilient than that. But I don't know.

I liked Ro and Miller, I will disregard the fact that their history and flashbacks did the heavy lifting here because they were just really cute. I liked the premise as I said, and the series of on-air fake relationship interviews really called to mind the Hunger Games which I think I'm going to reread now actually. Um, I also liked Vera. Oh, and as much as the company taking over the inventor's vision and spiralling everything out of control plot has been done, the twist at the end was killer. But the way they dealt with it was dubious. TALK TO A LAWYER.

4 stars I enjoyed

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