- Publisher: Levine Querido
- Published Date: July 8, 2025 (pre-order available)
- Reading age: 8 – 12 years
- Grade level: 3 – 7
- Pages: 256 pages
- ISBN-10: 1646145089
- ISBN-13: 978-1-64614-508-9
- Author: J.E. Thomas
The AI Incident by J.E. Thomas is about Malcolm, a 12 year-old boy hoping for a forever home after bouncing from one foster home to another. Knowing teenagers are rarely adopted, he feels his time is running out and is doing everything he can to increase his chances of finding that special family that will adopt him before he hits the dreaded 13. He has focused himself on that one goal.
In the meantime, he is in a temporary home with Mrs. Bettye and is struggling to adapt to a new school. Enter FRANCIS, an AI-assisted robot, who has been sent to the school as a prototype to improve its standardized test scores. Malcolm and his new friend, Tank, are assigned to escort the robot through their various classes as it learns how to help raise the 7th grade test scores. As time goes by, it becomes increasingly clear to the students that FRANCIS is concerned only with test scores and not with actual learning. The AI attempts to gain more and more control to meet its primary goal, and shows little regard for the students themselves, not to mention the teachers, etc.
This is a charming little book. It is clearly aimed at readers younger than me, but I still enjoyed it. For a simplistic take on AI dangers, it does a good job of exposing potential issues, not only with AI, but with administrators more concerned with test scores than with actual learning. It is not a preachy book, but it slides in examples of things like the robot’s inability to recognize African American faces, which is a real issue. Many AI’s have not been trained extensively on minority images and content, and develop biases based on this unequal subject matter in their training. It shows how AI’s (or people) aimed at a specific goal may miss the reasons for the goal in the first place. They may actually subvert the goal they are trying to achieve.
The AI is also a metaphor for many school districts focused on ‘the basics’ over a more diverse curricula. For example, art does not help with standardized test scores so it is not valuable. Learning how to learn is less important than memorizing facts. Taken to the extreme, memorizing specific questions and answers is more important than even memorizing facts. It is more important to get the right answer than to learn how to determine the right answers.
The AI Incident is also a heart-warming tale of finding friends and family and community. As Malcolm deals with the pressures of the new school, new friends (and not friends), the foster care processes, the school administrators, and the overly aggressive AI, he is forced to learn new ways of interacting and to sometimes let feelings be more important than goals.
Make no mistake, this is a kid’s book. It is not very complicated. You can probably guess how it will end up well before the end of the story, and yet, it still made me happy when we got there. If you have a young person in your life, or if you are a young person, or if want to pretend to be a young person for a little while, this book may be for you.
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“Anthrophobia: A Teacher’s Tale” – by Matt Truxaw
Matt Truxaw’s newest book is Monster, which released on 1/12/2026. This urban fantasy, horror, thriller will keep you turning the pages.
He is also the author of the hard science fiction thrillers: “Plastiphobia/Plastivore” and “Anthrophobia: A Teacher’s Tale”
You can find them all on Amazon in Paperback, Hardback, Kindle and/or free to read with Kindle Unlimited.
When you read any of them, he would really appreciate a review/rating on Amazon or your favorite book seller/book reader site.
More about Matt:
He was born in Orange County California many years ago and he still lives there. He has been reading books for most of those years and writing up book reviews for the last few years. He gets most of his books out of the library so expect a lot of old science fiction classics book reviews and other science related reviews in addition to newer books he comes across.
If you want to be ‘in-the-loop’ on these and other works, you can follow his author’s page on Amazon or his Facebook page.
For more reviews and articles by Matt here on Amazing Stories (Click here).
Monster: A Novel by Matt Truxaw
