Helen Phillips "is the author of six books, including the novel The Need , a National Book Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children" (book jacket). This is her most recent speculative fiction novel. Although this book has received numerous laudatory reviews, I didn't much care for it... maybe because I never had kids. I found the children's behavior obnoxious on many occasions and their mother's mostly passive acceptance of same distressing as well. In other words, I didn't like any of the human characters and couldn't identify with much of the stress in the storyline. Which isn't to say that the story lacks relevance. As the New York Times notes in their review, "Along the way, the story raises many unsettling questions. What is the right role for A.I. in our lives? In a world of so much artifice, what counts as authentic experience? How do we usher our children into a future that we find frightening to imagine?"They provide this opener of the general plotline: "In Helen Phillips’s near-future novel, “Hum,” a family’s dream vacation away from technology devolves into a misadventure with major consequences." The review goes on to provide a much more detailed explanation of the settings, actions, and characters' interactions--with other members of the family as well as with one significant "Hum." They conclude by praising the author, "This sleek ride of a novel further cements Phillips’s position as one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction."
The Los Angeles Times gushes, "“Phillips has given us a lot to chew on, but there is also something comforting embedded in this cautionary tale: an homage to our adaptability, our capacity to love and our willingness, however reluctantly, to embrace the new … Here she urges us not to surrender our power to choose and to resist, but to be thoughtful warriors, deciding for ourselves how we will dwell on our imperiled planet.”
Here is Kirkus' review and summary: "What happens when the forests are gone, surveillance cameras are ubiquitous, and AI-programmed robots do the work? Set in a future altered by climate change and technology that may feel uncomfortably close at hand, Phillips’ new novel again shows her talent for finding warmth, humanity, and connection within an all-too-conceivable dystopian landscape. The action begins with May Webb, an unemployed mother of two elementary school students, undergoing a procedure designed to alter her features just enough to confound facial-recognition software. (The procedure is performed, as are many tasks in the world of the novel, by a robot with a soothing demeanor called a hum.) For surrendering her face to this experiment, May—whose AI-communication job has recently rendered itself obsolete and whose husband, Jem, has been laboring to keep the family financially afloat working gig-app-facilitated odd jobs—is paid the equivalent of 10 months of her previous salary. She immediately splurges on a three-night stay for the family in the idyllic Botanical Gardens, an accessible-only-to-the-rich paradise of greenery, frolicking animals, and fresh air walled off to shut out the city’s grit, graffiti, litter, and soot. But the family’s perfect vacation takes an unfortunate turn when the children wander off and get lost, setting in motion a string of events that endangers the family’s power to stay together. Writing with precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion, Phillips renders the way love and family bonds—between partners, parents and children, and siblings—can act as a balm and an anchor amid the buffeting winds of a fast-changing, out-of-control world. A perceptive page-turner with a generous perspective on motherhood, identity, and the pitfalls of 'progress.'”
