Imagine a world where we’re all hooked to our individual electronic devices, which feed us our music, communicate with our friends and know our needs; imagine a tech company that dominates an entire city, where your social pecking order is reflected in the devices you possess. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. It’s all there already… Apple, Google, Facebook. So Jinxed, by the young Canadian Amy McCulloch (Simon & Schuster, £7.99), is very much of the moment.
It’s set in a city in Canada dominated by a tech corporation: ‘The final goal of Moncha Corp is to make life better… And to make people happier.’ Its academy is where every bright teenager wants to go. And its genius invention is the baku, like a smartphone, but animal-shaped and mobile, with whom owners bond, and which becomes more or less a projection of themselves. Our heroine acquires a cat baku, Jinx, with oddly feline characteristics.
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