To be honest, when I finished reading this book, I didn't know where to put it. I didn't know where it wanted to be filed in my mind or my emotions, I couldn't tell if I liked it or not, and in the world of artists and creativity, I kind of feel like that's a good thing.

Here's what I did like:
It was unexpected, imaginative and surprising. The detail of the world Johnston built is so intricate that it couldn't even be restricted to 327 pages of the novel and had to be continued in the author's notes. The uprisings and alliances that are imagined and the way in which one small deviation in tradition could possibly change the whole scope of the world in which we live is quite genius. Knowing what we now know about the effects of colonialism, it is hard to buy into a world where colonialism isn't the atrocity it was, even with Johnston's admirable efforts to create a world in which race isn't a taboo subject and complex genetics is a commodity, but what is the point of fiction if not to allow you to suspend reality?

She got me with that twist. Yes, there is a twist and it's a good one, which I only "kind of" saw coming.

You can read the rest of my review and what I didn't like about this book at:
https://geeks.media/that-inevitable-victorian-thing-by-e-k-johnston