Review of "The Algorithm of Us" by S. Page
2/10/20260 Comments

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.