The Unseen World

This is an excellent, ambitious, strange and thoughtful novel. Moore manages to mix in, in equal parts, a family drama, a mystery, and an exploration of what it means to be human.

Young Ada Sibelius knows her father, David, as a man of routine and predictability. When tragedy brings Ada's sheltered childhood to an end, she learns that her father's past held far more secrets than she ever imagined. Led by a cryptic message and an unbreakable computer code, Ada embarks on a search to uncover David's history. A complex, finely drawn story, carefully observed and beautifully constructed.

The Unseen World is an exquisite book. It is beautifully written and has many layers. It can make the world of computers fascinating to all. The relationships are carefully drafted. I think that this book will be widely read by book clubs as the opportunities for discussion are unlimited..

The Unseen World is a wonderful mix of coming-of-age story, mystery, with a little bit of science fiction thrown in. It is a masterfully written and moving story that will stay with you long after you put the book down. The story follows Ada, a young girl growing up with a genius for a father, who homeschools her and brings her to his lab every day. She has an idyllic life, hanging out with intelligent adults and learning skills seemingly far beyond her years. Then, her father becomes ill and her world begins to deconstruct as he descends into the abyss of Alzheimer’s. She is left with an unbreakable code her gave her, the one tantalizing clue that could unlock the secrets of his past life. Ada’s journey as she copes with her father’s illness, seeks answers to his past, and leaves her childhood behind, makes an incredibly powerful story - one you will not soon forget.

One of the burdens of adolescence is learning a new "truth" about one's parents. Their heroism dims, the qualities a child treasured seem inferior in the light of burgeoning ego and implacable peer pressure. We all go through it.

Just not to the extent of Ada Sibelius.

When we meet Ada, she is homeschooled, awkward. Her life revolves around her father, a noted computer scientist exploring artificial intelligence, and his colleagues at the lab at BIT. But as her father stumbles and then falls into a fatal battle with Alzheimers, Ada is forced into school, into living in the home of a family down the street, and into facts that call into question far more about her father than whether he was "cool" or not.

This book is a rush. I couldn't put it down--I finished it in a single day, so enthralled was I by unraveling the riddles as Ada confronted them. The Unseen World of the title is more than one family's past. Moore turns it into a hyper-real vision of our future, too.

The final mystery of the story, unwound in the book's final pages, isn't just a mystery of Ada or David Sybelius, but of the narrator, tying together in a very clever way, the unseen hand that has guided the reader to this very satisfying conclusion.

Thanks to NetGalley and especially the publisher for granting my wish!!

This book started out a little slow for me but once it picked up, I was hooked and couldn't put it down!

Ada is an only child, conceived with a surrogate and raised by her father, David. The book begins in Boston in the 1980s, when the computer world was expanding by leaps and bounds. David ran a lab at the Boston Institute of Technology. David raised Ada in the lab and the science world was her everything. She didn't go to school - David taught her to exist in his world. She was a prodigy and didn't fit or socialize with peers of her own age. As David succumbs to illness, Ada finds out things may not happened as David told her.

The book flips through time periods, mostly between the 1980s and 2009, when Ada is an adult. I really liked this book - loved hearing about the progression of computers, code breaking, artificial intelligence in the middle of figuring out the real truth.

Don't miss this one!

A well-written coming of age story with historical and mystery elements--this novel succeeded on so many levels. I loved the nuanced characters and the setting, and I just could not put it down. Highly recommended!

This was an excellent complex story with well developed characters and fluid writing. I was intrigued and surprised by the well developed plot, but the novel really shines in the wonderful characters. Highly recommended.