Yeah, this didn't work for me. It's strong when it leans into its cozy vibe, but the author inserts a lot of political critique that didn't land for me.

I liked that Newitz created a found family vibe, and how the noodle shop essentially became a safe space for marginalized people to come together and find community. There were some evocative themes here, especially compelling were the exploration of gender identity and the healing of post-war trauma via communal love and support.

With that being said, I'm not a fan of books that use robots as main characters to create heavy-handed symbols of marginalized people. The robots here are less robot and more human archetypes. The parts of interest, such as the robots exploring creative expression through the freedom of their bodies, weren't pushed far enough for a sci-fi novella. Exploring these themes in sci-fi is so expansive because you can break boundaries and create answers to existential questions, and this book didn't do that.

The robots could have been replaced with humans and the book wouldn't have changed much. While they were likeable enough, I couldn't get over the sour taste of feeling like they were cheap replacements of real marginalized people. "See these robots? Now imagine if they were (insert identity here). Now do you feel empathy?"

For me, all the elements came together in a really weird way that came across as heavily neolib and kind of tone deaf. The book's setting is in a near future America, where California has seceded from the United States after a civil war. At times it wasn't clear whether Newitz was poking satirical fun at the ridiculousness of Silicon Valley techno-capitalism, or positioning California as some sort of mecca of human rights and independence.

The book has a lot of sympathy for immigrants, which is wonderful, but paired with the vibe of celebrating California's "freedom" was a strange choice, considering Californian -- and American -- liberalism's love for ICE, militarized police, mass incarceration, and mass deportation. It often falls back on surface-level liberal messaging. For example, when the robots learn their recipe for biang biang noodles from a real Chinese woman's shop, and then the chef robot says "we can't call our noodles authentic because we aren't actually Chinese and it's not our culture". It reads like classic cultural appropriation for profit while using cheap symbolic messaging to preemptively assuage guilt.

While I think the use of AI and crypto is realistic (America is on its way there now, yay!), the timing of this book's release unfortunately makes the book come across as pro-tech oligarchy. It's not the realism that's the issue, it's the fact that these ideas aren't interrogated, which makes them feel unintentionally sympathetic to a status quo that many readers are actively fighting against.

In a time where corporations are allowed to rely on harmful AI replacement rather than being pressured to focus on labor rights, the question of "should AI be allowed to own businesses and get paid" falls rather flat. While I understand that's not exactly what the book is going for, considering the AI are basically stand-ins for immigrants, queer people, and disabled people, that's how it comes across.

This techno-capitalist future assumes dignity and personhood are valued through wage labor, a pattern in cozy SFF I already find shallow. Here, paired with metaphorical marginalized robots and an unexamined hypercapitalist backdrop, it felt especially tone deaf.

I wouldn't normally expect or demand political critique from a cozy novella, but Newitz set the standard that this was cozy with a side of political commentary, and I found the commentary bit especially lacking.

I received an ARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.