From the author of When Franny Stands Up comes a genre-bending story told in linked obituaries and newsfeeds over three hundred years about one AI woman grappling with her grief after the mysterious death of her human daughter, and wondering what it really means to be human.
Poppy Fletcher is just another teenage statistic. Death by suicide. Drowning. Her mother left to wander through a maze of grief. But this is no ordinary mother. She is Peregrine, an AI walking the earth in a (nearly) human body, misunderstood, loathed, feared. A fugitive whose home is nowhere.
And this is no ordinary story of grief.
Because the feeling is so foreign to Peregrine, she turns to human obituaries to help her understand her own suffering. By piecing together a tapestry of human lives throughout history, Peregrine begins to unravel the truth of what actually happened to Poppy—and it takes her places she never could have imagined.
Through the miasma of grief, Peregrine finds a story of art and love and betrayal, greed and war, and redemption that spans several centuries, traverses our dying planet and beyond, and ultimately helps her understand her role in the world.
 
Contributor Bio
 
EDEN ROBINS is the author of the novel When Franny Stands Up, which was named a best book of 2022 by the Chicago Reader and a best queer book of 2022 by Autostraddle. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Slate, USA Today, LA Review of Books, Catapult, and others. She is currently a school crossing guard, and previously, she sold sex toys, crafted jokes for Big Pharma, and wrote cognitive behavioral therapy for an AI chatbot. She lives in Chicago, has been to the bottom of the ocean, and