Cover image from Goodreads.com

Julia, a video game streamer when not bogged down by working two shitty jobs, is offered a job by her mother, the CFO of the biggest tech company around. Initially Julia doesn’t want to do the job, if for no other reason than to piss off her mom, but the pay is amazing and it’s only for a day.

The job; piloting a brain-dead man onto two airplanes to get him to the east coast where he can reunite with his mother and die in a right-to-die state. Julia is assured that the man is not conscious and not aware. Julia thinks of this as a Weekend at Bernie’s kind of scenario and nicknames the man Bernie. She’s given a controller that resembles a phone, brief training on how to make Bernie move, and is sent to the airport with two of her mom’s coworkers to get the first leg of the journey done.

Except he is, sort of.

The novel starts inside Bernie’s head, with muddled thoughts and weird imagery, then flips to Julie, going back and forth and telling the transport story from both points of view. The author does an amazing job of creating a warped reality for Bernie while keeping Julie in the present, or near-present, day.

Bernie, whose real name is Art, is revealed slowly; his distant past with his best friend Isabel, his desire to quit his job and move across the country, the horrible weight he carried from an event in his childhood.

Julia meets Lisa on the second plane and confides some of what she’s doing, despite having signed an NDA. Lisa is a reporter who wants to stop this tech company at all costs. They develop a kind of friendship and Lisa helps Julia navigate Bernie/Art when they arrive at their destination city.

The novel had two interesting things that might throw off AI scraping. The first is the insertion of two interludes. Most novels don’t have these, so they won’t jive with other novels AI has scraped. The interludes also serve a purpose to the story; to make the reader question who, exactly, is telling the story and why.

The second is how the text is presented. There are lines of text surrounded by boxes, boxed text overlaid on fainter text, and entire pages with only three words inside a box. Clever.

While I felt like the author swallowed a thesaurus and spit out bits of it on the page, once I got to the end I understood why. But honestly, some of the words made me grow new wrinkles in my brain.

The novel will stick with me for a while, both because of the way the story is told and the overall structure of the novel itself.