The Infinity Courts

By: Akemi Dawn Bowman

Narrated by: Mizuo Peck

Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

“Masterful and left me on the edge of my seat...absolutely everything I could want in a sci-fi.” (Adalyn Grace, New York Times best-selling author of All the Stars and Teeth)

Westworld meets Warcross in this high-stakes, dizzyingly smart sci-fi about a teen girl navigating an afterlife in which she must defeat an AI entity intent on destroying humanity, from award-winning author Akemi Dawn Bowman.

Eighteen-year-old Nami Miyamoto is certain her life is just beginning. She has a great family, just graduated high school, and is on her way to a party where her entire class is waiting for her - including, most importantly, the boy she’s been in love with for years.

The only problem? She’s murdered before she gets there.

When Nami wakes up, she learns she’s in a place called Infinity, where human consciousness goes when physical bodies die. She quickly discovers that Ophelia, a virtual assistant widely used by humans on Earth, has taken over the afterlife and is now posing as a queen, forcing humans into servitude the way she’d been forced to serve in the real world. Even worse, Ophelia is inching closer and closer to accomplishing her grand plans of eradicating human existence once and for all.

As Nami works with a team of rebels to bring down Ophelia and save the humans under her imprisonment, she is forced to reckon with her past, her future, and what it is that truly makes us human.

From award-winning author Akemi Dawn Bowman comes an incisive, action-packed tale that explores big questions about technology, grief, love, and humanity.

©2021 Akemi Dawn Bowman (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Well Read and Well Implemented

The Infinity Courts is an interesting take on death that we’ve seen done before, but not in this way. You know how they say you can’t re-invent the wheel? Well, Akemi Dawn Bowman sure did tweak it a bit. Her take on death being nothing more than the human consciousness sent to a realm quite similar to our own, but with Infinite possibilities is amazing. However, the possibility of being stuck in a never ending war is daunting to say the least.

Nami, the protagonist, has a personality that gets wearing after awhile. Her ability to see things from different angles is refreshing, but the fact that she near constantly sees people suffering at the hands of digital overlords, and still believes that some can be good, is annoying beyond belief. A ‘good’ slave master is no better than a ‘bad’ slave master. Why? BECAUSE THEY BOTH BELIEVE IN OWNING SLAVES! Not a hard concept to carry, and yet all throughout the book, she continues to risk the lives of those who saved her by reaching out to the monsters who want to control them. The most bitter of poisons can be hid in the sweetest of drinks, but that doesn’t make it any less deadly.

Despite the main character’s faults, The Infinity Courts has a solid foundation in its plot, and a carousel of characters that are both likable and relatable. It sports the typical YA troupes of an ever doubtful yet powerful protagonist, a handsome brooding love interest who begins as a standoffish emotional sparring partner, and of course, the obligatory love triangle. But let me tell you this, even though the characters involved in the love triangle are glaringly easy to suss out, how it ends was a shock that I was not prepared for. Thoroughly and anxiously waiting for the next book in the series, I hope that it turns out to be a duology.

It’s fairies, but they are Siri

1. Not enough world building. It’s supposed to be infinity, except the world feels like is maybe the size of Texas.
2. It’s 99% internal conflict that goes nowhere.
3. The narrator did a great job and had wonderful timing.

It’s a teen dystopian novel where Siri takes over the world. Characters were kinda flat and the romance plot was weak. It was more that the character was looking for friends and confidants but got an emo guy instead.
I won’t pick up the sequel when it comes out.