The world has stopped. But Rachel is just getting started…It’s spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein—mother of three, recent divorcée, and Brooklynite—is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park dates with younger men, flirtations with beautiful women, and actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation.But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs?Driven by this possibility, Rachel creates Frankie, the AI chatbot she programs with all the good parts of dating in middle age . . . and some of the bad. But as Rachel plays with her fantasy to her heart’s content, she begins to realize she can’t reprogram her ex-husband, her children, her friends, or the roster of paramours that’s grown unwieldy. Perhaps real life has more in store for Rachel than she could ever program for herself.
This will throw you right back into 2020 and the height of a pandemic -- how would you feel if you got divorced on the precipice of COVID? It was certainly an interesting thought experiment. I liked it at times and really disliked it at times. It was well written but perhaps too real? Definitely interesting - give it a try!!
Somehow she'd thought that they'd agreed, in a nebulous, unarticulated way, that they'd have adventures together, would create some new kind of way to live, figure out how to forge a family life that was totally unlike a sitcom. He'd ridden a motorcycle around their college campus, for Christ's sake, and yet once they were married, he expected meat and potatoes on the table when he got home from work. He and his friends used to stage elaborate illegal rock shows in abandoned warehouses, and a few decades later he was scolding her about her dishwasher loading. She'd assumed they were, like, too cool for convention. Certainly she should have discussed her expectations in actual words, rather than gliding along on assumptions, but: youth. She'd presumed he wanted, as she did, an equal partnership. Hadn't he read The Feminine Mystique? He'd taken Women's Studies 101! She knew because she had been there, making eyes at him from the back row.
By the end of their marriage, she couldn't remember the last time her husband had done anything for her or the children or their home that she hadn't had to request and remind and trade for. For a long time, she'd tried to convince herself that this was simply the economics of partnership. He accused her of nagging him constantly. Maybe she did.
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