Ken LiuScience Fiction · Fantasy·b. 1976
All That We See or Seem
Synopsis
Julia Z was known as the "orphan hacker" at fourteen; now she's built a quiet, anonymous life in a Boston suburb, determined to stay invisible. That obscurity ends when a lawyer named Piers tracks her down, desperate for help finding his wife Elli, a rare dream artist who has been kidnapped.
Julia learns Elli was secretly crafting private dream experiences for an international crime lord, who is now holding her life hostage in exchange for more. To save her, Julia has to blur the line between the world she can hack and the one she can only dream, on a cross-country chase that drags her own buried past back into the light.
How it reads
Prose complexity 7/10