Revision

Mira is living an ordinary life in New York City. She works at a coffee place, she avoids her family, and she has a pretty good boyfriend, Benji, who is the founder of a new news website, Verity. When he suddenly breaks up with her, she decides, as a little bit of petty revenge, to declare herself Benji's fiance on his Verity page. When he comes back a few hours later and proposes she starts to suspect that Verity might be more than it seems and, if so, it could be the best or worst thing to ever happen to the world.

I enjoyed the book. Mira seems so real. She has complicated feelings about things and is indecisive without being paralyzed by it. I could identify with feeling like things weren't right and moving forward anyway, sometimes out of hope, even when that hope is already revealed as foolish, and sometimes out of a need to just keep going forward because to stall out would be to fail. She doesn't know who to trust, she doesn't know if the bad guys are bad or misguided or manipulated, and, while the ultimate villain was a little two dimensional, the conflict was nuanced.

On top of that, Phillips managed to walk the line of setting the book in the present without beating that point to death. One of my pet peeves is when a book drops brand-names to constantly remind the reader that they are in the present instead of using them only when absolutely necessary. I think it will age well, so that in 10 years readers will have enough big touchpoints to know it was set in the 2010s but won't be overwhlemed with outdated (and inevitably obscure) references that don't serve the story.

Recommended if you're looking for an approachable science fiction book about a normal girl dealing with extraordinary circumstances.