Shelley Stone has it all: a career as the CEO of Conch, a cutting-edge wearable tech company; a handsome husband; two intelligent children; a household staff in a decadent home in Silicon Valley; a toned, tanned body. She power naps while standing in lines to maximize her time, routinely wakes at 2 a.m. for business calls and schedules meetings with her children for optimal bonding time. But from the opening pages of Elisabeth Cohen's debut novel, The Glitch, it is clear that this model is becoming unsustainable.
The temporary disappearance of Shelley's four-year-old daughter from a family vacation kicks off a series of strange and stranger events that pull down the carefully constructed life that Shelley has built. She meets a young woman with the same name and scar as herself, who seems to know everything about Shelley's childhood memories. Conch comes under threat. Her husband considers moving to Brazil with their children. As the world around her crumbles and Shelley, for the first time in her life, begins to question herself, The Glitch starts to feel like a fever dream, throwing Shelley a series of increasingly bizarre challenges that may or may not be real. Though some of the plot twists in Cohen's debut are confusing at best, it's easy enough to ignore these faults as Shelley's search for something--the truth? Her purpose? What it means to have it all?--builds to a startling crescendo. With wit, humor and heart, The Glitch reflects on the role of technology in our lives, the very essence of reality and what it means to be a woman (wife, mother and leader) in a male-dominated world. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm