The story opens in the 1980s, when 12-year-old Ada Sibelius is living in Massachusetts with her father David Sibelius. David, head of the computer science lab at the Boston Institute of Technology, is developing an artificial intelligence program called ELIXIR.....and Ada is helping teach ELIXIR to have 'human conversations.'
Ada was born to a surrogate mother, and essentially grew up in David's laboratory, where the research team functions as her extended family.
The closest Ada comes to having a mother is David's long-time colleague Diana Liston. The other scientists in the lab - Frank, Hayato, and Charles-Robert - function something like Ada's uncles. Ada doesn't go to school, but is 'home schooled' by David, who provides a rigorous curriculum for his intelligent child.
Liston, who has a married daughter in Boston and three sons at home, has lived on Shawmut Way for decades. When David became a father, Liston arranged for him to buy a house down the block. Thus Ada can visit Liston at home, and Liston can help Ada with 'girl stuff' like training bras.
Ada and David are happy and doing well until an incident at a party foreshadows trouble. David always throws an annual dinner party for his staff and graduate students. Every year David prepares lobster, Ada passes out gin rickeys, and David presents the same tricky riddle - about one man who always lies and one man who always tells the truth - to the new students.
This time David has a mental blip and can't recall the solution to the puzzle.
Though Ada doesn't know it yet, this presages David's oncoming Alzheimer's Disease.
At about this time, David - who loves puzzles, codes, and encryptions - gives Ada a floppy disc in a plastic clamshell case. David tells his daughter the disc contains a puzzle for her to solve, and it might take a long time.
A couple of eventful years later David is confined to a nursing home and Ada is living with Liston and her three boys, William, Gregory, and Matty. Ada is in Catholic school now, but she's socially awkward with her peers and has no real friends. In fact Ada's closest companion is ELIXIR, who Ada still 'converses with' every day.
A year or so later, Ada learns that David has been harboring huge secrets about his past. Ada is desperate to know the truth, but David's dementia makes it impossible to question him.
From here on, the book jumps back and forth between Ada's teenage years and a time more than two decades later, when Ada is a computer programmer in San Francisco....working on a virtual reality game.
The book becomes rather bogged down at this point, going into great detail about Ada's experiences in middle school and in high school; her interactions with the Liston boys; her first crush; her search for information about David's past; her attempts to solve the puzzle on the floppy disc; her anger at her father's deception; etc.
As we learn about Ada we also learn about David, who had a difficult childhood and lived through harrowing times as an adult. Like Ada's story, David's tale is overly detailed, and - though fascinating - slows down the story too much (IMO).
I was surprised several times by twists in the book and it wraps up in a unique fashion that I didn't expect. All in all, this is a compelling novel that I'd recommend to fans of literary fiction.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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