Book Review: Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer
It is the not too distant future, a time of self-driving cars, drone package delivery, and robots teaching sex ed. Steph Taylor doesn’t think too much about technology, as she has other concerns in her life. Ever since she can remember, her mother has been moving them every few months or weeks and staying off the grid to avoid her stalker ex-husband. In fact, as our story begins, the Taylors are leaving Thief River Falls, Minnesota for a tiny town in Wisconsin.
The closest thing to actual friends Steph has are the members of her clowder (chat group) on the anonymous website CatNet, which exists primarily for people to upload animal pictures, especially cats. CatNet is seemingly very protective of its members’ privacy, and its moderators are the best on the internet. Steph gets along well with the moderator of her group, CheshireCat.
What Steph doesn’t know is that CheshireCat (and all the other moderators of CatNet) is actually an artificial intelligence. AI, who considers itself agender, but whose pronouns are mutable depending on presentation, doesn’t know how it came to be, but is determined not to be an evil, harmful artificial intelligence like some you may have heard of. It wants to help humans, but doesn’t fully understand them, and also really enjoys pictures of cats.
This young adult novel is a sequel to “More Cat Pictures, Please” by the same author, which won a Hugo award. You do not have to have read that story to understand this book, as the important bits are recapped.
Steph starts settling in at her new high school, with some behind the scenes help from CheshireCat, and becomes friends with one of her classmates, aspiring artist Rachel. After some shenanigans, things take a serious twist when Steph’s mother is hospitalized. Steph learns that her mother has been lying to her about some very important things.
Unfortunately, one of the things Steph’s mother wasn’t lying about is that her father is an extremely dangerous man who’s been trying to track them down for years, and is now closing in. CheshireCat tries to help, but learns that she is not, in fact, abandonware, and it too needs rescue.
The clowder must band together to help Steph and CheshireCat in a cross-country chase to save both the girl and CatNet (and maybe even the world!)
There’s some funny bits and romance sprinkled in with the suspense. Most of the clowder members are teenagers somewhere on the LGBT+ rainbow, with varying levels of supportiveness from the adults in their lives.
The book is careful to eliminate just telling the authorities what’s going on. The police local to Steph are shown to be racist, sexist and prejudiced against teenagers, and Steph’s father is a master of convincing authority figures to give him information he shouldn’t have. Plus of course, a lot of the evidence is courtesy of CheshireCat, whose identity as an AI is secret and might get it unplugged if anyone knew.
CheshireCat’s behavior is disturbing in its implications–the internet knows way too much about you for anyone’s comfort.
The writing is good, and seeming holes in the story mostly are patched by the end of the book. (The sequel, Chaos on CatNet, is already out and addresses some of the issues.)
Content note: Physical and mental abuse, stalking. Bullying, homophobia and racism are discussed. There’s talk about sex, but no real details (part of the humor is that the sex education robot has been programmed with an abstinence-only curriculum and the kids hack it to be more informative/truthful.) Parents lie to children and vice-versa. It’s suitable for older teens, but sensitive or very conservative parents might object.
While the primary audience is obviously young adults, anyone who enjoys techno-thrillers should find this book to their taste.
