story identification - Trying to remember a book where a young man refuses to upload his mind digitally

A young man lives in an abandoned town where almost everyone has uploaded their mind into a network (which I think was based on crystals somehow?) so that they can live forever in peace and prosperity. His parents left him as a kid to join the network and left him in the care of a manufactured creature, which I believe was lizard/dinosaur like in appearance because that what the man liked as a kid. He occasionally visits his parents, who are always worried because they want him to "live" forever as they do, and they end up secretly creating a woman for him to fall in love with so that he will want to join them. Turns out that they did this by smushing together copies of his grandmother from a bunch of different times in her life. Apparently someone does this often, because I know the woman has a conversation with another being created the same way, who's basically enslaved

I have no idea when it was published, it could have even been in the last few years. I think the cover was mostly white? Any help would be much appreciated

Answer

This seems very close to Circuit of Heaven, and it has a sequel.

From Circuit of Heaven:

Plot Summary- In the future, most of the Earth's population have abandoned their bodies and permanently uploaded their personalities to "the Bin": a vast network of silicon crystals that supports a perfect, peaceful, deathless virtual society. Only the creeps, the crazies, the religious fundamentalists, and a few righteous rebels remain behind. One of these last is 21-year-old Nemo, forsaken by his parents' quest for cyber-utopia. Nemo is determined to live, age, and die in the bleak hell that the Earth has become rather than sacrifice his soul to a technological purgatory. But all of Nemo's hard-won convictions are shaken when, on a visit to the Bin, he meets his soul mate, a beautiful woman newly arrived in the virtual paradise who is struggling to recall her mysterious, dreamlike past.

Comments

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