Chatbots, Pop Rocks, Booksta and Loss in YA “Message Not Found”

In the beginning of Message Not Found, by Dante Medema, Bailey and Vanessa are high school besties, with so many private jokes and rituals, sure to be lifelong friends. When Vanessa dies in a random, tragic car crash after leaving Bailey’s house, naturally Bailey is miserable.  But even in her grief, there’s just one thing that keeps coming up. If Vanessa was driving from Bailey’s house to go meet up with her boyfriend, like she said she was going to do, then she was on a very strange road when she crashed…

Bailey’s mom once worked on a program that would take a person’s emails and chats to create an AI. Desperate to talk to Vanessa again and find out what could have happened on the night she died, Bailey secretly copies her mom’s project and begins updating it. She adds her all messages to and from Vanessa to create a chatbot, V, with Vanessa’s personality and memories. It’s an idea I’ve seen before in fiction, a bit like the social-media afterlife program in Still Here, and it’s believable, because Bailey’s mom works in tech, and Bailey has her own coding skills. V sends comforting text responses, in a familiar voice, but virtual V doesn’t know any more than Bailey does about the end of Vanessa’s life.

Vanessa was a bookstagrammer, and there’s a lot of fun book life comments, in thin story about loss.  With a booksta aesthetic bedroom, special limited-edition book pins, and so much more, Vanessa’s interests often seem to pull Bailey in. As Bailey knows well, a “book girl” would get a cool death scene and a sweet goodbye, not the messy and confusing ending here.

As Bailey starts taking riskier measures to find out more, like stealing friends’ phones to get more of Vanessa’s messages,  the story turns darker. She’s determined to find out more about what happened on the last night of Vanessa’s life, even though her friends and her moms encourage her to let go and try to move on with her life. But maybe someone who’s encouraging Bailey to stop investigating and move on has another motive…

I found parts of Message Not Found on the slow side, which was definitely intentional, since it’s about Bailey’s recovery from the loss of her friend, and also about that stage of marking time in high school, just waiting for the next part to start.  But there were scenes that were too realistic about the slow waves of grief as Bailey tried to find equilibrium after loss.

I particularly liked Bailey’s relationship with her moms. I feel like a lot of YA fiction is weird about the adults in the story. Either the protag’s parents are always conveniently off at work, letting the entire plot happen in an adult-free, rule-free world, or the teen protag is so secretive that they spend chapters on a problem that would be sorted in 5 minutes by asking an adult about it. Here, the moms try to give Bailey both support and rules, and Bailey loves her moms, even if they stress her out with college pressure, and even if she occasionally sneaks a boy into her bedroom. Much more realistic.

Overall, the bookstagram and the chatbot are just ways that Message Not Found develops a solid, introspective YA story about grief and friendship.