"The Unseen World" by Liz Moore

Whatever led me to this book should get an award.  I started reading this on Sunday morning and finished it just now, a book of more than 435 pages. I could not put it down.

The story is so enticing: we enter when the main character Ada is just a little girl, being raised by a single Dad, no mother ever in the picture. Her father, David, is a brilliant mathematician and scientist and cryptographer.  Ada comes to work with her father at a prestigious tech college in New England, she doesn't go to school but learns everything from her Dad.  Needless to say, her upbringing, while intellectual and caring, lacks the touch of a family.  But they are happy together, very happy.

Then David is diagnosed with Alzheimer's.  (It's not a spoiler, it's just a fact.) And Ada, in her early teens, is set adrift on a sea of confusion and displacement. Some of her situation gets sorted out, but other factors come into play, things no one could have envisioned.

On top of it all, David and his crew at the college are making huge leaps in the early days of the computer age, investigating things like virtual reality and cryptology and coding on a scale that might have even amazed Steve Jobs. It is fascinating to read and because the book jumps around a bit, timewise, we see the initial bearing of fruit in that tech world and then the final products much later in the timeline. 

But the characters are what make this book amazing.  The past two novels I have loved, "All The Light We Cannot See" and "A Gentleman In Moscow" were of a specific time and place but they were mostly about the people in those novels.  This one is the same. They are so finely drawn, so real, the reader has (or should have) great empathy, interest and compassion for them.

I hated for this book to end. The only flaw I found was in the last chapter, which seemed a bit calculating and a bit too crafty.  But that's just my opinion and that final chapter did nothing to alter my love for this book.  If you find it in the library, please take it out and read it.  And if a used copy comes your way, do the same so you can loan it to a friend. It's that good.

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