Comforting novel about escaping a social-media platform to create change.

Great for fans of Dave Eggers’s The Circle, Jessi Kirby’s The Other Side of Lost.

FICTION She Dreams in Blue Light: A Novel A.R. Malecki | Analogue House 340p, e-book, $9.99, ISBN 979-8-9882338-0-0

Malecki engages the topic of moral responsibility around the development of social media technology in this impassioned debut novel. Eleanor Crawford, young software developer at Atlanta-based Agora, “The Gathering Place of the Internet,” is optimistic about her role in connecting people through the platform, until her sister is blinded in an accident caused by using the system while driving. Soon Eleanor can’t deny the company’s sketchy behavior. Her desire to help her sister, a return to the pleasure of spending time in her family’s small inn, and the encouragement of her colleague-turned-boyfriend gives her the bravery to forge a new inspiring and ethical career path.

Malecki addresses frustration with the negative impact of social platforms by highlighting some of the core concerns and modeling a path out for ethical engineers. Eleanor’s arc is crafted with clarity and some power, though the novel’s depiction of Agora’s employees, practices, and workflow is at times hard to credit, showing a company tiny enough for a single engineer to implement major new features in days, but big enough that committees of employees who have never met one another are convened to guide policy through personal opinions hashed out over one short informal meeting. More engaging are sharp dialogue scenes capturing the absurdities of content moderation or the response to the company’s accumulating scandals, especially concerning issues of privacy. Also engaging: Eleanor’s love for her sister, who is blind.

Text exchanges and memos from management help create a feeling of immersion in the company culture, such as a heated discussion of whether to allow graphic photographs to be displayed after a bombing— and some employees’ concern that removing the images from this “new public square” ensures “Agora will be seen as the gathering place for cat photos and what grandma ate today—not the important stuff.” Malecki illuminates the competing interests of the owners of these platforms, as the novel builds to something rare in stories about tech companies: a sense of hope.

Cover: B+ | Design & typography: A- | Illustrations: – Editing: A | Marketing copy: A