The concept of this book is really interesting. It's a take on the AI that ruins lives, which I think is a cliche story. There were a few good moments but overall this book wasn't for me. The romance did not work for me neither the characters.

Good writing and a reasonable plot is completely let down by casual racism and misogyny. I find it hard to believe anyone in this day and age seriously thinks it's ok to consistently refer to a woman of Japanese descent as a "little Samurai hottie". This book managed to shoehorn in just about every stereotype of programmers, which I suppose is impressive in its own way, but I finished this book out of stubbornness rather than any appreciation of the characters.

What a fun book. Initially I was a bit put off because the protagonist Gabe has a total god complex but this didn't seem to last long as he is humbled by Pi doing what all teenage daughters do and rebelling. I thought it was interesting that she although appeared sentient, she couldn't relate to anything other than the binary world, she assumed that Gabe was just a program and couldn't understand the concept of something that was not within her frame of reference. This is a fairly complex idea.

The protagonist is a total geek, so much so that for any decision he runs through a binary tree process in his head which makes him a very black and white kind of guy. This is tempered by the love interest, Kimiko a half Japanese girl who is the adopted daughter of the man running the company interested in buying Pi, she seemed to be there to provide a reason for sticking in the skydiving scene and to be the moralist and also to force Gabe into thinking about treating Pi as a person. The whole issue of creating a AI who will could become a corporate cyber slave, and the whole ethical implications where only partially explored here, but they where enough to drive the plot in the direction it went in the end which made this book more than it could have been.

There is a skydiving scene around the middle of the book which I really enjoyed, and almost makes me want to take up the horrifyingly dangerous sport. The ending was fairly satisfying and open ended enough make the reader wonder a little, which I always like.

This is a quick and easy read and if you are in any tiny way a computer geek you will enjoy this book, there are jokes about binary that you have probably heard before but they made me smile nonetheless.