Book Review: 'Hey, Zoey' uses questions about AI to look at women's autonomy in a new light

Dolores is going through the motions of life when she finds a potentially marriage-ending surprise in her garage: a high-end, lifelike sex doll imbued with artificial intelligence named Zoey.

There are a lot of places that author Sarah Crossan can go from here — when is it cheating? What makes something human or sentient? How can we define a person's value? — and “Hey, Zoey” touches on them all.

But the main focus throughout the story turns out to be women’s autonomy.

The novel jumps straight into Dolores’ life with a rapid-fire series of first-person vignettes, a mosaic of snippets that give an overview of how we got here. Each tidbit ranges from a sentence or two to a few pages and jumps across times and places almost in a stream of consciousness, though the story never becomes lost or incoherent. The bite-size pieces make it easy to tear through, but also to stop and digest when needed.