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Smart and inventive, an emotional page-turner that considers the elusive definition of happiness.
Pearl's job is to make people happy. Every day, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion?
Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater satisfaction in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own kind of "pursuit of happiness." As his mother, Pearl wants nothing more than to help Rhett - but is it for his sake or for hers? Certainly it would make Pearl happier. Regardless, her son is one person whose emotional life does not fall under the parameters of her job - not as happiness technician, and not as mother, either.
Told from an alternating cast of endearing characters from within Pearl and Rhett's world, Tell the Machine Goodnight delivers a smartly moving and entertaining story about relationships and the ways that they can most surprise and define us. Along the way, Katie Williams playfully illuminates our national obsession with positive psychology, our reliance on quick fixes and technology. What happens when these obsessions begin to overlap? With warmth, humor, and a clever touch, Williams taps into our collective unease about the modern world and allows us see it a little more clearly.
"Starred Review. Imaginative, engaging, emotionally resonant...this novel is itself a recipe for contentment." - Kirkus
"Williams never allows satire to overtake her story's moral center or its profoundly generous and humanistic heart, resulting in a sharp and moving novel." - Publishers Weekly
"Daring, inventive, and moving, Williams' novel deftly illustrates that when it comes to happiness, there are no easy answers." - Booklist
"Allow me to introduce you to your new favorite writer. Katie Williams plunges into our obsession with technology and its effect on our lives and dreams, and emerges with miraculous gifts for us - she unwraps the present and the future." - James Hannaham, award-winning author of Delicious Foods: A Novel
"Tell the Machine Goodnight transcends categorization in the best way possible - it is part love story, part science fiction, part feminist inspirational wake-up call, and all of it moving and compelling. I never knew what was going to happen and, when I found out, I was always delighted." - Helen Ellis, New York Times-bestselling author of American Housewife
"Philosophical, funny, cleverly structured, unpredictable...I doubt I will ever read another a novel with a more moving trip up a VR mountain." - Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times-bestselling author of Young Jane Young and The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
"Filled with extraordinary writing, wish-they-existed characters, and unexpected narrative turns, this novel will delight your mind and heart." - Courtney Maum, author of Touch and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You
"Katie Williams's fierce moral intelligence sparks off the page…Generous, perceptive, intensely smart: this is just the novel we need." - Kirstin Valdez Quade, award-winning author of Night at the Fiestas
"A captivating, thought-provoking and utterly charming novel about the elusive nature of happiness and the limits of both technology and our own self-knowledge." - Carolyn Parkhurst, New York Times-bestselling author of Harmony and The Dogs of Babel
This information about Tell the Machine Goodnight was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Katie Williams's short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, and elsewhere. Williams earned her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches writing and literature at Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She is the author of two young adult novels, The Space Between Trees and Absent. This is her first novel for adults.
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