Catfishing on CatNet (2019)
Written by: Naomi Kritzer
Genre: YA Science Fiction
Pages: 294 (Hardcover)
Publisher: Tor Teen
Why I Chose It: I read and really enjoyed Kritzer’s award-winning short story “More Cat Pictures, Please” and heard she was expanding that world of a kind, cat-loving, self-improvement-urging AI into a novel. My first thought was, “Huh, how’s that going to work?” I decided it probably wouldn’t work well.
After that, I forgot about it, until suddenly its release date loomed, and I read its blurb and found myself on the phone in the middle of a workday to my local bookstore, saying, “I need this book, will you have it?” They obligingly ordered it for me, and I grabbed it up with a surprising amount of anticipation.
The Premise:
How much does the internet know about YOU? A thought-provoking near-future YA thriller that could not be more timely as it explores issues of online privacy, artificial intelligence, and the power and perils of social networks.
Because her mom is always on the move, Steph hasn’t lived any place longer than six months. Her only constant is an online community called CatNet — a social media site where users upload cat pictures — a place she knows she is welcome. What Steph doesn’t know is that the admin of the site, CheshireCat, is a sentient A.I.
When a threat from Steph’s past catches up to her and ChesireCat’s existence is discovered by outsiders, it’s up to Steph and her friends, both online and IRL, to save her.
Catfishing on CatNet is a surprising, heartfelt near-future YA thriller by award-winning author Naomi Kritzer, whose short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the Hugo Award and Locus Award and was a finalist for the Nebula.
Minor spoilers.
Discussion: So, given that I thought the short story was adorable, heartfelt, and sweet-natured — revolving around the AI attempting to teach people how to be happier, lacking any actual plot — how did the book (with an actual plot!) stand up?
Primarily, I loved it.
Kritzer is fantastic at sucking the reader right in. I was already fond of the AI, but by the end of the first few sentences, I was hooked on Steph’s personal journey as well. She and her mother have been on the run from her father for years — so long that her fear is tempered by exasperation and familiarity. It’s an interesting mix of emotions that hooked me.
I really fell into this book, short as it was, to the point where I had those dizzying moments of confusion if I got interrupted. (What do you mean you can’t feed yourself dinner, cats? Oh wait, the AI would be disappointed if I were mean to my cats. I’d better feed them.)
The genuine good nature and light humor that I loved so much in the short story were everywhere here; Kritzer’s thesis seems to be that people are mostly kind, mostly helpful, mostly reasonable if you give them the ability to be. As an example, even the irrationally awful English teacher becomes a better person — once the AI convinces her to quit by drone-bombing her car with books that point out she’s a terrible teacher and should move to a city she likes. And Steph’s clowder — her internet group of friends — is nothing but supportive.
It’s actually a deceptive little book. There are a lot of major societal issues touched on in here: racism, classism, the institutions that want to stamp out anything that they disapprove of, whether it’s proper sex education or creativity or just not fitting the social norm. But for the most part, they’re touched on so gently that it never seems to detract from the hopeful and weirdly wholesome tone the book has. (Wholesome from the liberal standpoint, just saying.)
I loved the kids in their clowder; I loved the way they supported each other, whether it was lending a sympathetic ear or figuring out a way to hack a sex ed bot that gave bad information in health class. They might be faceless kids for much of the book, but they had clear personalities.
I loved the whole sense of a world-not-quite-this-one that Kritzer evoked to good effect. Delivery drones, self-driving cars, and classroom robot lecturers are all commonplace, and they each have a role to play in the plot.
Two things kind of threw me out of the book. There was one moment where the teens confront a computer programmer, and I abruptly found myself on the side of the exasperated adult instead of the earnest teens. A weird bit of mental whiplash that reminded me, oh yeah, I am totally not 15 any longer.
The bigger problem for me was the villain of the story: Steph’s father. He was my only real sticking point. No matter how it was finessed, he felt like an angry caricature and over-the-top element to me.
Go back up to the premise. You’ll see the segment about both Steph and the CheshireCat being in peril: those things are true, but those two stories didn’t really mesh all that well for me. It’s probably because it hinged so much on Steph’s father and he never felt developed for me. He’s a collection of BAD THINGS: abusive, controlling, obsessive, and kind of insane — he literally wants to rule the world.
So when you have to pit the sweet-natured, still fairly innocent AI against the evil madman, it felt uneven. The first confrontation was great, and is the moment that puts the AI in peril.
But the final confrontation was a little… weird. Very Disney. Very light. Very ’80s teen movie.
This is always a problem when an author has kids fighting genuinely evil adults: where does the line go? Scooby-Doo or Hunger Games? Happy-go-lucky or dystopic despair? How do you defeat the bad guy permanently without destroying the fundamental goodness and innocence of the kids?
Kritzer went for happy: keeping the kids on the side of lightness and virtue, with minimal trauma. They don’t become stone killers. They stay kids. And I love that. I want more happy, optimistic books to read. But her father was so bad that the ending felt weirdly easy, given the lead-up.
One minor quibble I have is that the book premise suggests that the internet is a giant risky minefield of spies and enemies. There is some of that in this book, but mostly, with CheshireCat on all the pages, helping Steph and her friends, I had a very hard time seeing the internet and networking as anything but beneficial, even with the villain using the internet against them. The blurb seems to nod toward Person of Interest, but this is in no way comparable to the Machine or Samaritan. Basically, I came out of this thinking oh, I wish there was a nearly-all-powerful AI to organize my life and friends for me….
In Conclusion: Despite my minor issues, I really loved this book. I would and will recommend it to many people. My poor roommate has already had my copy dumped on the very top of her TBR pile with a post-it note: “THIS ONE FIRST!” (What, she’ll love it.) For those of us who ate up Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, this will probably be right up your alley. For anyone who loved “More Cat Pictures, Please,” this is definitely a pleasant continuation, and you should pick it up. There’s going to be another book after this one, and I can’t wait!
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