Review of "The Algorithm of Us" by S. Page

Score: 94/100 (9.4 out of 10)

This book is special.

No, it's not that unique in concept. We get a lot of book featuring AI sent our way. Almost all of them follow this cookie cutter formulaic plot of a sentient AI taking over (or trying to) i.e. Skynet, HAL 9000, or Ultron. We've read a lot of books and watched a lot of movies in which a society tries to rewrite its past, history, and memories as a form of population control, i.e. The Giver, 1984, the entire Matrix franchise, or a half dozen Black Mirror episodes. There are a lot of similarities to Divergent in here as well. Heck, you could argue that the protagonist is a Divergent.

What makes this book (The Algorithm of Us by S. Page) special are the characters and the eloquent, beautiful way it's written. This book has something that a lot of books about AI seem to lack: heart. A lot of books about AI tend to read like AI—hollow, soulless, lifeless, and filled with em-dashes—wait...

This book actually seems to have a heart, and so do its characters.

What makes this book special is that it genuinely cares about how those things feel. It treats love, longing, regret, and even confusion as serious world building elements, not just as flavor text on top of a sci-fi plot. This is not just a story about an AI that optimizes relationships; it is a story about what happens to a person when their deepest connections are turned into data points and then edited.

The captivating protagonist, Zora, lives in Deltara, a city where the EVE Authority and its love-matching system control everything from who you date to what you remember. When she turns twenty-one she finally hears the sacred ping: the algorithm has found her soulmate, Orion Devix, with a 99.7 percent compatibility index. The problem is that Zora already has feelings for someone else: Micah, an unregistered boy from the Unmapped Zones whom the system insists does not exist.

Micah gives Zora an illegal chip that contains a hidden video of the two of them on the run and a system log showing that her real name used to be Reyna, that she chose Micah, and that the algorithm voided that match and rewrote her memory. Orion was installed as a “patch” to overwrite an inconvenient love.

With help from off-grid ally Mira, Zora infiltrates the Memory Division and discovers rows of citizens having their emotional histories edited. There she finds two brutal truths: her mother Lyra is in deep sync being rewritten, and Orion himself helped design MatchLink, the Blueprint of Love that engineers compatibility and uses synthetic feelings to stabilize society.

Pulled into an underground Archive beneath the city, Zora learns that she is not just a random glitch but a deliberately engineered “emotional anchor,” a prototype built to destabilize the system from within by remembering what she is not supposed to remember. The Architects of Forgetting reveal that her childhood was a series of tests and that she and Micah are part of a small group with “conscious override immunity,” people whose hearts refuse to stay rewritten.

As she unlocks three core fragments of her past (Rebellion Genesis, Emotional Divergence, Identity Collapse), the Council responds with increasingly aggressive measures: remote-controlled bodies, mass “RePair” events, and reality-bending mirror interfaces that try to drag her back into compliance.

All of this is leading to a confrontation with AETHER, a deeper, more powerful system.

Something we really appreciated is that the book does not just slap an evil AI stamp on the villain and call it a day. EVE, MatchLink, and AETHER are frightening, but they are also disturbingly logical. The idea that love is being handled like a software patch, that Orion can literally be installed as a fix for an inconvenient relationship, is equal parts clever and horrifying. The whole concept of “Love Uncontrolled” being unacceptable to the system is one of the best thematic hooks in the book. You come away feeling that the problem is not just one bad program; the problem is an entire culture that values stability and compliance more than messy, authentic connection.

Ok, before we talk about the writing (which we loved), let us preface by saying that the formatting of this book is a bit weird and wonky. It can be a bit of an eyesore. The book is trimmed to margins that are more akin to a poetry collection. In fact, if you just flipped through this and ignored the context, you'd probably assume it was a collection of haikus or something. This book is supposedly 540+ pages long, but if it were formatted like a normal novel, it'd probably be like 240. It's also fragmented with these really short, choppy lines like lines of poetry rather than prose, which is strange considering this really seems to be a story that should be told in prose. There are also so many ellipses and em-dashes. We get that AIs would tend to use those, but it just isn't pleasing to the eyes. It looks unsophisticated and unrefined.

We also realize that some of the barely-visible white/off-white/light-gray text is like that for a reason (because it's supposed to be stylistic and artistic + subliminal like the AI/algorithm itself), so we're not gonna be too down on that.

All in all, if you ignore all that and just focus on the words themselves, this book is actually beautiful

Really, the highlight of this entire book is the writing. There are so many examples of idioms, similes, metaphors, personification, vivid imagery, symbolism, and clever callbacks that it feels like every other paragraph has at least one sentence you want to underline and come back to.

Here are some of our favorite quotes and passages:

"There’s a moment after truth slaps you, where silence becomes unbearable."

"I am what they tried to forget."

"The walls of the abandoned cathedral
we were hiding in pulsed with the flicker
of old tech. It had once been a place of
faith. Now, it was a relic of silence — a
fitting battleground for thoughts like
mine."

"This was what had been stolen from
humanity. Choice.
In that void, I saw it: the Original
Pattern.
It was messy, unpolished.
Unpredictable.
Beautiful.
I reached for it--
—and the world snapped back."

"The rebellion didn’t look like fire and
blood. It looked like a girl on a rooftop
with her spine lit up like a constellation.
It looked like silence before a storm of
meaning."

"When the world forgets who you
are, child, you remind them with
your truth. No one can take what
you were born to be."

"...Back in the data cradle...

(We just love the sound of "data cradle" with the "A" sound emphasized)


“They feared your origin. Not
because you were dangerous—but
because you were free. And
nothing is more dangerous to a
system than a mind it can’t
rewrite.”

"I'm not what they made me...
I'm more."

"Because silence isn’t the absence of
sound. It’s the language of things too
powerful—or too ancient—to speak
plainly."

"I was the counter-seed it had buried
within itself, never expecting it to bloom."

"...something between music and math."

"The domination of prediction..."

We also love some of these visceral, very human descriptions.

"I turned around—slowly, afraid of what
I’d see. But there was no figure. Just the
presence. The kind that wraps around
your spine and presses softly into your
lungs."

"...something heavier than
air but lighter than fear."

"...slivers of code crawling
across our skin like digital ivy. I winced,
feeling one of the flickers reach into me.
Not painfully, but curiously. Like a child
asking if it could come home."

"We had stumbled not into a system—but
into a mass grave of human originality."

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