All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

TL;DR: Sadly a disappointing read with a passive main character.
Source: NetGalley, thank you so much to the publisher!

Plot: Julia Z has been laying low but gets unwillingly pulled into a missing woman investigation.
Characters: This might have been the worst part for me. I just could not connect to anyone here, nor find them interesting.
Setting: Our characters were on the move with no real permanent location but the various stops were interesting in a surface level way.
Mystery/Thriller: This was not thriller, not in the least. The mystery was interesting to a point then it got to be a bit of a snoozefest.

Summary:

Julia Z, a young woman who gained notoriety at fourteen as the “orphan hacker,” is trying to live a life of digital obscurity in a Boston suburb.

But when a lawyer named Piers—whose famous artist wife, Elli, has been kidnapped by dangerous criminals—barges into her life, Julia decides to put the solitary life she has painstakingly created at risk as she can’t walk away from helping Piers and Elli, nor step away from the challenge of this digital puzzle. Elli is an onierofex, a dream artist, who can weave the dreams of an audience together through a shared virtual landscape, live, in a concert-like experience by tapping into each attendee’s waking dream and providing an emotionally resonant and narrative experience. While attendees’ dreams are anonymous, Julia discovers that Elli was also providing a one-on-one dream experience for the head of an international criminal enterprise, and he’s demanding his dreams in return for Elli.

Unraveling the real and unreal leads Julia on an adventure that takes her across the country and deep into the shadows of her psyche. 

Thoughts:

Ken Liu’s fantasy work and short stories are some of my favorites I’ve read in recent years so a Scifi mystery thriller sounded excellent. Sadly I wasn’t as hooked with this one. The science fiction was fascinating as you can see his work with Fantasy really influencing the ideas he had but for hard scifi fans you’re going to find definition lacking.

The characters here were probably the most disappoint for me. I could have looked past and really enjoyed everything about this if I didn’t feel like we were following a sad puppy of a main character. Julie Z is possibly one of the most passive main characters I’ve read about this year. Everything reacts to her and she’s scared, only gaining some get up and go at the very end. She felt incredibly bland, which could have contributed to that sad, scared feeling and I never could find a good connection.

The mystery itself was okay, and the only part that was somewhat thrilling was so far at the end I was fully checked out. It’s not a bad book by any means but not what I was hoping from such a fantastic fantasy author. Not my favorite but you may enjoy it if you give it a shot.