未找到消息 by 但丁Medema is a romantic mystery that keeps the reader intrigued with every turn of the page. Medema tells the story of two “ride or die” friends: Vanessa Carson and 贝利 Pierce.
A lover of Disney princesses and blue raspberry flavored 流行的岩石, Vanessa dreams of being a writer someday. 贝利, 另一方面, hopes to follow in her parents’ footsteps to work in computer 编码 and artificial intelligence.
一天晚上, the girls trade 流行的岩石 therapy for champagne drinking and ice cream eating as they share secrets and commiserate about boys and 贝利’s breakup. When Vanessa receives a text message, she grows alarmed and rushes off into the night, claiming that Mason—her boyfriend—is at her house. Instead, she never makes it home.
The victim of a terrible accident because of snowy conditions on the pass in Tundra Cove, 阿拉斯加, Vanessa’s vehicle ends up over the edge.
Flooded with guilt for letting Vanessa drive off in the middle of the night and then texting her to check on her progress, 贝利 blames herself for Vanessa’s death. But the questioning and wondering remain: What was she doing on the pass, a route out of bounds to reaching her home?
Medema takes readers through the weeks following this devastating death to experience the all-consuming 悲伤 left in Vanessa’s wake. Feeling like “the motherboard to [her] heart has been fried and sold for parts” (313), 贝利 wishes there were some scientific method to apply to the situation of resolving Vanessa’s secret-keeping.
Hoping to help her daughter heal, Jacky-Mom shares a reverse scrapbook idea—a chatbot of sorts—that she developed when 贝利’s dad died. As a way to process her 悲伤, Jacqueline fed the bot with Myspace posts, 电子邮件副本, and any other digitized content so that she could memorialize and still talk to her husband. From this data, the bot develops algorithms and conversation strings. “In theory, it would seem like you’re having a conversation with an actual person” (46).
Without her mother’s knowledge, 贝利 steals the app from her mother’s computer and feeds it every text message, 社交媒体帖子, and email she has access to. In her desperation to discover Vanessa’s secret—hoping the knowledge of the secret will heal her—贝利 even “steals” two phones to get more material. Wanting not only to trace Vanessa’s steps from this digital footprint but to process her 悲伤, 贝利 continues to have conversations with Vanessa through the bot, 她将其标记为:V. 现在, as long as she has her phone, 贝利 can distract herself through the day, writing little notes back and forth with V. 在这个过程中, she tricks herself into thinking she’s okay, 但很快, she’s obsessed with algorithms and code that will make V feel a little more like Vanessa and that will hopefully supply answers about Vanessa’s enigmatic behavior.
Both 贝利 and the reader ultimately get the answers they seek, but Medema’s book moves beyond a simple mystery to explore the nature of 悲伤. Tired of feeling empty and unable to let go, 贝利 has to admit eventually that she’s happiest when she leaves her sadness behind and distracts herself with friends or homework or mindless entertainment. Rather than allowing her heart to cripple with thoughts of betrayal and guilt, 贝利 learns that “maybe part of 悲伤 is letting go, 继续, and forgetting all those questions that are left like missing puzzle pieces” (215).
Another pair of morals about human behavior come from Liz Winters: “If people have the capacity to be unkind to others, they have the capacity to be unkind to you” (355), 她告诉贝利. She also points out that we all take turns being shitty to others, so we have to ask ourselves: What am I looking to get out of this trash talking? With that kind of candid self-reflection, we can turn our attentions to something more positive.
- 由唐娜发布