Simple yet surprisingly complex. It’s got a strong verisimilitude quality, without being too granular. I also really liked how intersectional messy it is, as well as the overall tone. The characters are rendered very vividly primarily through dialogue, which was really interesting.

I think this could have been a 5 star read had I consumed it in text format because, while the narrators were good, it also exposed some problems with the text when read aloud. Now,I am not saying every text should be able to be read aloud, I do not believe that to be the case. But the problem I had in this particular case is that stylistic choices authors sometimes page for pagination - in this case, specifically adding dialogue tags that are invisible while reading - do not translate well to audio. You know when says/said is not invisible? When it’s spoken out loud. It is so grating and it actually tilts the narrators voice into a simplistic monotone that can’t really be avoided. I also just don’t think you need any dialogue tags whatsoever in most of these scenes because usually it’s only two people speaking. When body language enters the equation, and dialogue has purpose, you really just have no need of tags. But it does have an anesthetic purpose when looking at a page of text.

Long story short: I definitely recommend reading this rather than listening to it. As a straight white dude, I really can’t speak to the queerness of the text, but felt it contributed to the verisimilitude, so rather enjoyed it, even if it didn’t feel tonally innovative to queer stories I’ve consumed previously (a short coming I’ve read in other reviews). So, if you’re looking for thoughts on that aspect of the text, please look at other reviews~

It’s admirable that the voice is so in synch with Klara, an artificial friend (AF). Also really liked the theme. It’s effective at making you think about what truly nourishes us, as humans, and how we treat things that we define as objects and subsequently deny humanity and empathy. We have a very messed and complicated relationship with how we construct our values. The fact that the story succeeds at eliciting so many interesting notions, for me, was pretty enjoyable.

The detractors though, for me, were that the voice, as fitting as it is, is really quite basic, structurally, and that grated on me after a while. It’s quite interesting at the start, since it’s effective at communicating who Klara is and how, despite having a limited and point of view, literalized through a store window, complex things can be distilled to simple language and create complex understandings. But, then I can’t separate that it’s just not fun after a while to read sentence structures that are so repetitive and in engaging. It’s hard not to zone out sometimes.

Finally, I think that this isn’t actually new on any front. It made me think a lot about bicentennial man and A.I, and speculative fiction around androids and robots earlier on. This feels like mostly retread ground. There’s a mix of hope and sadness mixed with utilitarian prose. It feels like something dated with a new coat of paint, though still clearly valuable.

There are structural things about this work that are super interesting to me. It’s intersectional with auto fiction and nonfiction and literary fiction, for one, which creates a dissonance that makes a lot of sense when considering the ending of the story.

It made me think about how it’s a bit ingenious to make it intersectional like this in order to shift POV. Sometimes you’re Kim, sometimes you’re a disembodied watcher, and you don’t really know why for quite some time. Sometimes the disembodied narrator empathizes with Kim so much it slips into narration from her perspective, but then it slips out again into a distant analysis. With the last sentence of the work, I found that very clever.

It also effectively shifts the problems Kim faces from societal to the individual level. While it’s hardly the first to do this, I think it’s way more effective to demonstrate micro aggressions and misogyny from within a characters headspace because then male readers, such as myself, aren’t able to distance ourselves—which again, ties in nicely to the ending.

I totally understand why someone who was expecting literary fiction would feel let down. Expectations from that genre are so different from the goals of this book. It’s important to prepare the reader. I had already read reviews about this and knew it was different, so I had no problems on that front. It’s a challenging thing to classify, but I typically like these kinds of outliers.

Also, the narrator was great, imo!

Hah, what a clever story. I wasn’t wild about 2nd person but understand it’s purpose. Luckily, the premise and theme were strong enough that I got enough satisfaction to distance the annoyance of the POV. It also helped that the narration is phenomenal.

I think I liked the second book a bit better than this one, but I really loved this whole trilogy, and what it was exploring. It’s such an interesting thought experiment. And the ability to generate such an interesting setting and notion, then critique it, inserting a flaw in it, is just such a commitment to an idea.

Had I known that the first book was leading here, I think I’d have liked the first one a lot more, because it really did feel like a lot of setup at the time. The second one has a lot of payoff from it, and then this one is a process of pointing out vulnerabilities while continuing and tying into previous events.

Pretty great stuff. I think if I re read these one after another it would probably result in even higher praise. Since they’re far apart, the through line and character arcs weren’t solidified.

Well, I finished it this time. And it honestly just feels like it’s funny in the same way your problematic uncle or family member is when they come for thanksgiving dinner. Sure, sometimes they make salient points, but this also use humour and satire as a cover for underlying problematic viewpoints. Being critical and cynical doesn’t erase the aspects that are clearly outdated. On top of all that, it actually wasn’t funny.

The absurdist elements and critique of the army I can get behind. The structure works well, tied to the theme in an interesting way. So I didn’t mind that it was disjointed. But everything else about this book doesn’t work for me.

Confession time: I super duper conflated this with John Carter. I was very confused for a while, and this certainly exceeded my expectations, which is what I assign 4 star reads.

A really neat thing about this was there’s like a… directors commentary? I guess? Where, in between each short story, the author puts in a few sentences. At first I thought this would be really annoying but it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome and it’s often really interesting. Especially the context of the stories spring boarding him into other works, such as Fahrenheit. He also talks about how X story is situated in his mind in the 50s, when reactionary elements seeded anti-intellectualism we now see the product of today. But also we’ve come a long way too. it’s quite interesting to me. It’s impossible to separate this from the author as a result; but in the most unique way I’ve read lol.

I expected pulp action fantasy and stayed for the specificity of theme that makes “good” classics embed themselves in cannon (often). Loneliness, especially, is handled well here. Visually, thematically, and well articulated. As with most “old” sci-fi, the dialogue is the weakest link. I kind of wonder what I’d have rated this without the fascinating commentary and had I not been expecting something completely different. It could have been 3 stars. I’m not sure. Regardless, it’s this kind of serendipity that endears me to plenty of books I remember fondly, so it feels a certain kind of fair.

Ahhh pretty fantastic. I did not expect it to go to those places but it did. Queer found family. Queer love story in transhumanist, weird future space time. Flying fish and a crew of people who restore dead things, struggling to make decisions while always being to each other, even when it’s hard. It’s all very good and shit gets wiiild in the final quarter of the book.

Fantastic. Post-climate change setting the likes I’ve not read before. Characters and world rooted in Navajo mythology/culture, which added to the originality which divested the fiction from tropes. Great characterization for all the characters. Fast-paced, wicked action. Couldn’t ask for more, really. Will pick up the next book for sure.