A little dated now, but this is a different take on an idea first developed by D F Jones in his series of books about Colossus the super computer, and turned into a film 'Colossus: The Forbin Project'. The difference here is that the computer in Hughes' novel has been developed to make a city perfect whereas the 1960s Colossus novels and film deal with a computer developed to run the nuclear defence of North America. And the protagonists here are a fourteen year old girl, Caro, and her friend David.

Caro's father has developed the computer and Caro herself inadvertantly influences its programming when she gives it advice after its first efforts at efficiency - to utilise the parking spaces of council officials in the evening for public parking - don't go down well and it seems the Mayor might 'pull the plug' or at least force her father to take out the computer's self governance. Her advice that the computer must 'make people like it' are taken too literally, in typical machine fashion. Soon the computer is hypnotising the adults through cable TV soap opera to accepts its edicts which become increasingly repressive - old people in hospital have their life support turned off, for example - and the city becomes an enclave cut off from the outside world. Caro's father is touring the country, extoiling the value of the system to other cities, so there is the additional threat that the repression might spread. It is up to Caro and David to try to halt the computer's mindcontrol.

For a YA novel and of that period, this has a pretty downbeat ending, and also has unresolved questions about whether other characters actually survive or not. The relationship between the two main characters came over to me as a bit symplistic and I didn't enjoy this one as much as volumes 1 and 2 of her Keeper of the Isis Light trilogy. ( )

Monica Hughes was writing dystopian fiction for young adults long before it was popular like it is now. This story is about a computer that takes over over everything that happens in a small city. The characters are likable, if a little bit shallow and the plot is pretty good. ( )