Blurb

You are being played.

Your every move is being watched by businesses hoping to manipulate your behaviour. Every picture, every post, every like, every follow, every purchase, every search.

When 17-year-old Riya Sudame inherits her father’s secret AI algorithm, she and a handful of carefully selected Keyholders hold the power to predict people’s futures using their online data. But with great power comes great responsibility, and they must safeguard it from falling into the wrong hands.

Enter Jim Booker, a powerful social media tycoon, who will stop at nothing to steal the technology for himself. Soon Riya faces a critical choice. Fighting ruthless tech giants seems like an impossible task—wouldn’t it be easier to relinquish her father’s creation in exchange for a normal teenage life? 

But if she does, she will have to live with the knowledge that she is the reason that, like everyone, you are being played.

Review

Taylor has written a high paced, moral led thriller that could well be happening right now.

So many of the scenarios – data mining on social media, monetising of it, scientific developments intended to help all being bought up / stolen and produced for profit – happen already.

Anticipation takes these ideas to the next level. It puts two teenagers, with no knowledge of the power their fathers’ technology, in charge of protecting it and ensuring it ends up helping everyone.

However, this leads them into dangerous territory, their families put at risk and them trying to save themselves and the technology without using traceable technology for fear of being traced. At one point they even try to turn the tables by influencing the influencers to try to uncover the scams and show the world what is happening.

The theme of data manipulation in this story takes us deeper than it just being sold so companies can spam us with target audience specific ads. It takes us into the territory of our online footprint enabling those companies to accurately predict our behaviours and actions, to manipulate and lead us where we may not want to go, making them even more powerful than they already are.

Thank you to Neem Tree Press and @The_WriteReads for the ARC to allow me to review for this blog tour.