Valet by J.P. Lacrampe Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, literary fiction, relationship fiction, robots, science fiction
Pages: 272
Published by S&S/Saga Press on June 2, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
For fans of Kevin Wilson and Andrew Sean Greer, a helper robot and his 35-year-old ward embark on a mad-cap adventure to save the fate of the family company in this whimsically speculative ode to Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster.
Cy wants nothing more than to be useful, raise his utility score, and receive the next update for his operating system. But that’s easier said than done when he's tasked with helping his owner’s 35-year-old son “get out of his funk.” Grayson is nothing like his go-getter, CEO sister Charlotte. He didn’t inherit the family robotics company when their dad passed last year, he doesn’t have a master’s degree, and he just can’t seem to figure out the San Francisco dating scene. He’d rather eat synthesized mozzarella sticks and make pottery at his studio, Kilning Time.
When Grayson learns of Charlotte’s plan to sell the company to a tech conglomerate, he panics. It’s not just the family business at stake, it’s all the technology—like Cy—their dad invented over the years. So he does what anyone would he steals the flash drive with his father’s most important work stored on it and plans a corporate takeover. If only he knew what that meant.
To make matters worse, a fellow VALET deserts his owner and asks Cy to help him hightail it out of town, Grayson’s first real date—and her dog—keeping showing up at inopportune times, and the behemoth tech company wants this deal closed yesterday. Grayson, Cy, and their trusty golden retriever, Sasha III, must go on the lam until they figure out exactly what to do, and whom to trust.
A hilarious, mad-cap adventure that is as tender as it is insightful, Valet asks not just what it means to be human, but what it means to be family.
My Review:
At first, this appears to be the story of a “poor little rich boy” as told from the perspective of his ultra-competent, long-suffering personal attendant, the valet of the title. Which is where those comparison to P.G. Wodehouse’s iconic Jeeves and Wooster duo come striding – or strolling as the case might be – right in.
But this isn’t Grayson St. Claire’s story. It’s Cy’s story, being told from Cy’s first person perspective. That Cy even has a first-person perspective and the “I” voice to go with it is just a part of what makes the story interesting AND what keeps the reader following along. Because at first ‘Gray’ doesn’t appear to be all that compelling of a character. He’s just an idle rich man-child who doesn’t know what to do with himself and doesn’t seem all that interested in finding out.
Cy, on the other hand, knows EXACTLY who his Master Grayson is, and loves him like a brother anyway. Which is what makes Cy’s situation both heartbreaking and precarious, as Cy may have been raised alongside Gray by ‘their’ father, an eccentric AI genius, but Gray is a person with rights, privileges and a share of ‘their’ late father’s very successful company, while Cy is a piece of property, owned by Gray’s ambitious mother, and tasked with getting Gray to start adulting and get married to a woman the family thinks is suitable. If Cy fails, he’ll be sent off to die as a lowly mech with all of his intelligence stripped from him.
The thing is that Cy is doing his best to get Gray to go with the program. Not by manipulating him, but by providing Gray with the love and encouragement that his family never bothered to bestow. And it’s working, but not the way that the matriarch of the family had in mind. It’s certainly not working fast enough, well enough, or in the right way nearly enough to keep Cy’s owner from punishing him repeatedly for his failure to force her son to obey her wishes for his future when she’s clearly never given a damn about her son’s wishes for himself.
In the end, it’s not his mother’s threats that push Gray into growing up, it’s an existential threat to his family’s company, his father’s legacy, and his closest friend – Cy himself – that give Grayson St. Claire the real purpose in the world that Cy has wanted for him all along.
It’s the making of Gray, the saving of Cy, and the hope for a reconciliation with the rest of his family. And it happens because Cy, as well as Grayson himself, do the best they can do for the people they care about – including each other.
Escape Rating B: I picked this up in order to figure out whether it was science fiction or not. The blurb doesn’t help much, either, as the two contemporary authors mentioned, Kevin Wilson and Andrew Sean Greer, are both relationship/literary fiction writers while P.G. Wodehouse may have been a literary law unto himself, he wasn’t exactly either of the above – OR a science fiction writer.
In the end, I think this is SF in the same way that both Orbital and The Ministry of Time were frequently referred to as SF. Meaning that all three stories use a lot of SF “furniture” to tell a relationship story that borders on literary fiction.
Now that I’ve finished it, I’m still not 100% sure of that answer, which certainly requires some explanation.
First of all, I did enjoy reading Valet once it got going, but it starts out slow and picks up speed as it goes. At first, Gray and Cy both seem a bit flat as characters because they fit so firmly and completely into the stereotypical roles of the upper-class twit and the faithful servant.
Which is where things started to get both interesting AND frustrating. Frustrating because I knew this reminded me of something that took a while to pull into memory. The story isn’t so much Jeeves and Wooster as it resembles the 1981 movie Arthur starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minelli, with Sir John Gielgud as the Butler. Gielgud won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance, and that movie was hugely popular. To the point that although I never saw it, the plot still stuck in my memory, as did its ubiquitous theme song, “The Best That You Can Do”. (Hopefully I’ve just passed that earworm onto someone so it will leave MY head.) That Cy frequently excuses upcoming actions that he knows will displease his legal owner by saying that he will “do my best” echoes the song. Often.
The starting plots of the movie and this book are very similar. And I do mean VERY.
But the SFnal setting of Valet adds some fascinating opportunities for snark, as it’s a relatively near future. Near enough, at least, that the idle rich in Gray’s circle are the scions of our present-day tech companies a mere one or two generations down the line. AND it’s an extension of our present of continuing mergers and acquisitions into mega-corporations. It’s also a world in which the much-feared replacement of human workers with robots and AI has come to pass with devastating economic results – except for the ultra rich, the class of which Gray and his friends are definitely a part.
There’s a lot to unpack in Valet – to the point where I wish that I had Cy to help me with the unpacking. In the end, this is a story about what it means to be family, and turned out to be quite a bit more heartwarming and heartfelt than one would expect from the beginning.
If I were trying to describe the whole of this book succinctly, I’d say that it’s what Service Model might have been if it had been written by TJ Klune instead of Adrian Tchaikovsky. Or if Automatic Noodle were more about the humans in the community that is created around the bots and less about the bots themselves.
It’s also a story that manages to walk through some very dark places, both literally and figuratively, yet still comes out into the light. Readers who don’t mind a little SF in their literary or relationship fiction, or who don’t mind a little relationship/litfic in their SF, will enjoy visiting Cy and Gray and the family they’ve found.
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