A psychologist is sent to a long established space station with the goal of helping to discern something about an alien presence.

A kind of quintessential setup for science fiction, but this is the absolute perfect execution. It’s a layered story that builds thematics and numerous conceits to both convey what it’s like to attempt the problem or puzzle of unraveling this mystery at an emotional level, while building to a larger point that science fiction usually ignores; especially in regards to alien life and communications, first contact, etc.

It’s hubris to believe we could throw ourselves in tin cans through voids and expect that the scientific method and even the very reasoning process could be adequate in the task of truly attempting to understand something actually alien. Not something anthropomorphized or metaphorical, or some other device or method to relate to something fundamentally unknowable.

The book has no interest in fulfilling genre tropes or providing prescriptive answers, nor does it even provide a “likeable” character. It is purposefully isolating, it’s form meeting function. There’s a fair chunk of hard science in here from time to time, and I can see why some people would not care about that part. But the book is very short and I found that section particularly interesting, though I am a complete layman in the area.

It made me feel like the main character, provoked some thoughts I don’t think any science fiction book ever has, and it is one of the rare books that acknowledges, or rather highlights, that there are some things every person simply must reckon with, less it destroy them. Now, or later.

Quick note: I was warned off the other translations, with this audiobook and an ebook being the only ones that the author thought was adequate. I followed along with the other translation softcover I have and it is quite different. The prose and construction is quite a bit more complex in this version, and there is more nuance. But I didn’t think, from what I saw, that the other translation was too bad, either. I’m not surprised plenty of people thought the original one was completely fine.

This by far exceeded my expectations. A book that is very smart in its critique of academia, of gatekeeping, of antiquated, bloated institutions that are too big to fail and perpetuate systemic harm. It’s also about the importance of history and representation in history and said representation curating relevancy in knowledge today. Peripherally art, beauty, decadence—Puritanism writ large policing minorities. The operating of individuals in spaces not meant for them.

It also is actually dark academia, not merely the aesthetic, but the motifs and themes you’d think would encapsulate that trend of subgenre. Honestly, this is incredibly dense in topics and theme, and I think it’s wildly successful at conveying the complexity situationally. It could easily have been overwhelming. I am sure some of it went over my head just by virtue of consuming it on audio. The more intricate a story, the more I just need to read it.

Great worldbuilding, fascinating, complex characters that are rendered outside of the quintessential minority pool that publishers often dictate to authors. It’s unapologetically queer. The ending surprised me. The only fault was it picking up steam, as initially I wasn’t sure how interesting an archivist, exploiter academic angle would be, but once it clicked for me it didn’t let go.

What begins as something of an article on various taxi driver demographics and various socio-economic statistics became much more interesting. Shifting to individual stories of drivers all over the country to embody the points made about racism, sexism, and the role of taxi cabs at an individual and national identity level. From Uber wreaking havoc on cities to immigrant stories, to the story of a cab driver turned writer, I found most of these stories to be captivating. Especially the one focusing on female cab drivers.

This does a great job of shining a light on how society treats people as lesser than while showcasing the dynamic and incredible stories of people fulfilling a service literally everyone has used at some point in their lives. It’s an effectively humanizing tale, and one that can be extrapolated to people doing other kind of work, who also are looked down on. Effective piece of writing, for me.

This was such an interesting book to me. I have tabs peppering this thing. As I see it, this is a reaction to romance novels, so maybe post-romance (does that exist?). Rather than having the conflict be communication or some other flaw, the conflict is the inciting incident. A man tells a woman that she needs to do some internal growth in order for them to be together, and so the conflict is entirely within her as she earnestly undergoes that spiritual journey.

Both are, to their own eyes anyway, subjectively beautiful and men and women have fallen for them—yet no lasting romantic attraction is something they have encountered. They both have flaws that are stark; the man more so, I think. And is much older. But they are both in an apprenticeship. One which is primarily the process of being fully themselves, loving themselves as they are, while being apart. They can both be insufferable at times, but their endeavour, at least to me, is one of the most interesting things I’ve encountered. It gives beauty and substance to the mundanity of life, and the every day person. Something I generally like a lot in my fiction. Everyone is interesting with the right craft applied.

Reinforcing this is the stream-of-consciousness prose and the unconventional dialogue. It’s almost like what you’d usually get as dialogue, in terms of the refinement of what a character is saying… only it’s translated or run through a filter so it’s the core idea being conveyed. I don’t even know for sure that 100% of the time it’s not just subliminal communication, or something like it. Similar to how thoughts are on the page, with stray wisdom and epiphanies arrived at and then lost like a dream, they often tell one another what is at the heart of their being without, I feel, noticing. So they do say something, as chronicled by our protagonist, but what she recounts is the romanticized, recontextualized information, possibly.

This also felt really conducive to a queer reading. I don’t look for ace representation in things I consume, because generally very few things have it, and it’s pointless to look. But jumping out at me were several passages where it seemed very overt that the protagonist is demiromantic, and/or on the ace spectrum. How she thinks about love and romance versus sex are compartmentalized exactly right, and it kind of helps further understand, if the male counterpart is also ace spectrum, what that magnetic pull is. Like recognizing like, accepting and compartmentalizing certain aspects of their feelings and inner selves. I don’t know. It makes a heck of a lot of sense to me. If anyone else has thoughts on that, I’d love to know.

This holds a sublime voice. The type of book you can point to when people go on about “overwriting”, and at any given point in a page show how editing down the prose would absolutely be cutting the legs off of the character work put into the winding, evocative sentences.

The plot is a simple kind of recounting and therefor preservation, of an Ireland long past. One of my favourite sequences is when the town is to be fitted with electricity for the first time and the man set to do the job wanders each dwelling, mumbling about how difficult a job it would be. Ranging from bit of a problem to small miracle. Suppose you’ll be wanting a light in here, of all places!? (The living room). If you wouldn’t mind. Grumble grumble grumble.

It meanders in a coming-of-age way, but also, almost, cradle-to-grave. Marinating in the absolutes of his memory, high highs and low lows. And in all of it is a portrait of the land and people and community well rendered from each simulacrum. There is a bit of a through line, but not something remotely driven by plot. It’s quintessentially Irish in its telling of a life. It’s close to a 5 star read for me, but it doesn’t feel decisive enough in the end to reach that quite a height, for me.

Sweet, sweet interiority. Plot seekers beware. This is a story of a child going on a trip with her mother to Tokyo and spending time together, primarily in a museum. And that’s if. Except that because of the interiority being so granular, it becomes a human experience. It is slow and rich and rhythmic, controlling the pace with sentence variation.

The prose themselves are remarkable for their simplicity and, at key moments, dolling out specificity while otherwise being primarily accessible, clear, and concise. Once the style is situated the author deftly has the thoughts of the character analyze with verisimilitude the events that ought to be mundane, but when informed by the granularity of thoughts and the connects—especially to the art she is consuming—heighten the experience to a human, and universal one.

It also does something I really like in my literature: placing, in a casual manner, exactly what the book is about in a way that makes a reader paying attention realize it, while the narrator does not. It creates a truism where every person, when framed and analyzed and voiced properly, becomes infinitely interesting and worthy of contribution to the general intellect. Then parallels it with the nourishing or enriching properties of consuming and being critical of art. Which, of course, this is as well.

Masterfully handled, I must say. Will be looking out for more from this author in the future.

I loved this. Undeniably, it walks a line that allows it to be inclusive while also not pushing cis people too much, I think. But it’s also a really solid piece of YA romance with a sweet voice, plenty of well-earned cheese, and isn’t too easy. It doesn’t feel dark or like a horror story, and acknowledges the dangers of being trans, while also allowing Amanda to exist and be hopeful and inspiring. The audiobook narration was also _perfect_.

In looking through other reviews here, I saw one that links to allegations against the author. Domestic and sexual abuse, as well as mobilizing fans and followers against her ex-partner. These do seem pretty credible. Plenty of receipts. I recommend googling it to check out multiple sites and not just one. If it were any other book I might not rate it at all. This book does feel important though, and if I’m willing to leave reviews of Harry Potter books, despite JKR’s widely harmful views, I don’t think not evaluating the book is the answer. You could get this book second hand without supporting the author, or from the library, etc.

Probably not fair to judge a book when the central conceit of anthropomorphized creatures is something that you dislike. Pretty much read it because I was given it and may as well get another classic under my belt. Oddly, Mouse Guard and Red Wall I liked okay, probably because usually there are a multitude of personalities and characteristics within one species, whereas the notion of the “nature” of a particular animal being homogenized is just lazy and annoying to me. But also: I am not a child, so what does it matter?

In this near future dystopia a virus that targets testosterone has ushered in the end of the world. The virus drives them to live in their inhumanity. They travel around consumed and imbalanced raping and pillaging. That’s basically the only conceit you need to accept going into this. What if people with a certain level of testosterone were to essential be infected with a kind of psychosis.

Two protagonist trans women negotiate this world. Forced to hunt these men to procure estrogen to combat the virus that threatens to transform them into the very thing they hunt. Without access to hormones, it’s this, or simply allowing themselves to become worse than death: the embodiment of physical aggression and conflict and trauma they’ve had to combat their whole lives.

When they hook up with other trans folx and as well as an outpost of sorts filled with cis women militarized and tyrannically ruled by literal TERFS, meaning they believe they are feminist, yet do not acknowledge any kind of woman that isn’t born to the biologically determinist viewpoint.

The tension is masterful here because there are plenty of cis women that pass this Nazi ideology (and determinism was literally founded and proliferated by Nazi science rhetoric. Look it up. As well as nature versus nurture, etc.), meaning they present as these women think women should—whose bodies produce enough testosterone that makes the virus take them.

This creates factions that replicate those we see in the real world. The queer community has divisions: passing as cis, primarily, but also being socialized and therefor internalizing patriarchal ideology and exclusionary proclivities. And because this cis exclusionary colony could and should be working together with the trans people, to fight back against their literal common enemy: men, the colonists choose to withhold hormones and murder the trans people; illustrating that they’d rather die than work with people they refuse to see as humans, and as women. Despite… literally not being or behaving like… men. A byproduct of this is that many of the colonists actually need to be rendered more vividly by the author and humanize them more than their views of the trans people, because it is literally, visibly, a rhetoric that makes no sense. They just choose not to help other people that could help them fight against men and devote their time and energy to murdering people that need help.

Another genius byproduct of the virus is that it shows the reader how the issue affects everyone. More than simply trans women. And the hateful rhetoric robs people of their ability to extend empathy to another person, and justify it. But also: how do we determine right now if a person can compete in sports for either gender? By their testosterone level. Which has excluded plenty of cis women from competing as well.

On top of a well thought out central conceit though, the book is also propulsive. Excellent flow. It reminds me of a pulpy action flick, with actually great, if vivid, gory physical conflicts. Sexual assault is granular as well. There’s a never ending heightening of emotion for absolutely anything the two trans characters go through. The sex is given as equal granularity and the conflicts are, which I thought would be off putting but I think somehow creates a humanization for them. When you could die at any time. And have the threat of sexual assault and death from men be be a spectre, coupled with women also threatening them and, in some cases, fetishizing them as another means of dehumanization—it makes sense to me that sex would be as vividly rendered as the hyper focus of life-and-death situations.

That said. It is really gruesome. I listened to it on audio and I think that was the right move for me. Because narration (which was excellent by the way) aids in a kind of cinematic, removed perspective, I didn’t get too grossed out like I thought I would. On the page, since it’s self-generated, I’m sure it’d have been more difficult for me. The tragic and heinous things that occur are, as mentioned, equally counter balanced with the loving parts.

Every person feels three dimensional. No one is unimpeachable. It’s not some kind of power fantasy, when it easily could have been. It is concerned with showing that the real horror is how even when systems erected have passed on institutional knowledge to people, no matter who operates that power, it is inherently dehumanizing, ugly, and evil. It divides people who love one another. It literally kills, while it dehumanizes people in the far more grotesque ways than people are prepared to acknowledge. You simply do not have the option to look away here. It is exactly what horror is supposed to do.

I find that the best fiction tends to be so hyper focused on saying one particular thing, that it becomes about everything. A human experience. The condition of life. In this case: time. Our relationship to it; the process of constructing a life that I consider destiny or fate—man made, but robbed by puritans and given to god, as all Good things are. Sacrificed.

This narrative reclaims that power and gives it back to the people. The effect that someone who you don’t remember for ages and ages can have on you. So much time has passed and your grey matter hasn’t made an association. But then, something happens and you’re right there. Connected. Both embodied and apart from who you were, while being the product of those inconsequential moments.

The gravitas that every single chapter is built around is simply staggering. It says that what we do matters. We make and destroy lives at a granular level. While the goon comes for everyone, and some of these moments are irreparably sad—life and death stakes, playing for keeps with a throwaway comment or a squeezing of a hand, the compromise that settles and settled in the dregs of your soul. It also means that there is an inherent, beautiful and wondrous agency to the small creatures of our burgeoning lives.

Nostalgia lives here, sure, but for once it isn’t trite.