Disclaimer: I received an e-ARC from netgalley in exchange for a review.

This story follows a Zek (a genetically engineered non-human being) who is send by the HIVE (a totalitarian Asia that holds the secrets to bioengineering) to Amirkha (a dystopian USA that has separated even more along class lines than ever before) to sleep with an influential man, steal his sperm and kill him. Her mission should be simple, but then things go wrong. She finds herself unable to return to her base, but instead ends up stranded in Dizzy-Land, where she finds community with a group of women, who have survived as princess-prostitutes.
This is an interesting dystopian sci-fi apocalypse and definitely works better if you are able to immerse yourself into a strange experience and accept that many new words and concepts will play a role in the story. Since I enjoy sci-fi like that, I really liked this story. There’s also a glossary in the beginning, which really helped when I got confused while reading. I also quite enjoyed the world-building and learning about this new post-apocalyptic world and the few humans that managed to survive it.
It is dark and fast-paced and while there are some moments of relative calm, there is never really any moment where our MC Lilith really gets to feel at peace. She begins the story knowing she has to fulfil her mission or the cyanide in her system will be released and that pressure never really lets up for her. This means that everything has to move pretty fast and that threat to her life always hangs over her. It certainly does not make for a relaxed read, but to me personally it was something I enjoyed.
This also is a very dark read. It deals with the fetishisation that women, particularly trans and asian women, face by powerful and rich men and how rarely they are able to actually rebel against it. It deals with that absolute powerlessness and the various ways women deal with it (by accepting it, by stepping on other women to get ahead, by rebelling against it, by burning it all down). This conflict and especially Lilith‘s own experiences with it and reactions to it are really very interesting.
Lilith herself was also a really interesting character! She was created to be an Assassin, with the ability to steal rich men’s sperm, but unable to get pregnant, fetishised for her bio-engineered status, but also dehumanised for it. Her finding of community and love with other women is both incredibly sweet and yet also fraught with tension, due to her having to hide her Zek-Identity.
If you like dark sci-fi, women rebelling against the system that tries to keep them powerless, murdering annoying rich tech-bros, dealing with some of our current societal issues, but worse (mainly the fetishisation and disposability of certain women), some delicious gore and transfem pregnancy and you don‘t mind having to immerse yourself in new sci-fi terms to experience a story, please check this one out! If there‘s a sequel planned, I will certainly read it!
While I did enjoy the framing device of the teenage girl, who had a psychotic break, after taking LSD in DisneyLand, I do wish that part of the story had been explored further (also the Eldritch Creatures rising from the depths. What‘s that about? I need a sequel!). I also found it a bit weird that all the rich tech-bros where „a bit Aspergy“. While I do think that was dealt with fine in the end, it is something that confused me a bit.
 
Tw: sexual assault, rape, forced impregnation, prostitution, murder, violence, fetishisation/objectification, drugs, slurs

Disclaimer: I received an e-ARC from netgalley in exchange for a review.

This is a fascinating anthology combining Black philosophy and Black speculative fiction in 7 short stories/essays, often inspired by people from history. The anthology begins with an introduction, that helps set the tone, explaining that it is a combination of academic work and speculative writing and that this both is and is not Black speculative fiction. Most of the short stories themselves also include a foreword by the author to set the tone and I found that really interesting as it added depth to the stories.
Throughout these short stories and essays the author examines Black reality in America through a speculative lens, including Black philosophy, Black Academia and Black male lives in America. There’s a big focus on the past of slavery, but also the idea of a different, speculative past such as in “At Rest” or “Henry Box Brown”, as well as a speculative present, such as in “Theft”. Other essays explore Black media and the white consumption of it (such as “Appetite/Fever/Consumption”).
It is not an easy collection to read, but one that I enjoyed reading. Most of all this is an anthology I am looking forward for others to read, especially those more immersed in academia than I am. It is definitely something I hope to see gain a readership there, because I feel that it can really start some interesting discussions for the field of Black speculative fiction. I myself am definitely interested in reading more works by the author if he ever writes any more speculative fiction.
My only problem while reading this was that I did not immediately check out the footnotes accompanying each chapter, as I only realized that there was a lot of further discussion on each text after I was done with the anthology. So if you plan to read this, check out the footnotes for each chapter separately, I feel they add a lot of extra information/discussion material/food for thought.

I’ve taken notes while reading each chapter and will also be including them in my review, including trigger warnings.
Henry Box Brown: An Ode to the Enigma of Black Freedom: This story examines Henry Brown’s escape from slavery in a box through a modern lens, when during a trip to the museum a young boy crawls inside the box, which promptly disappears with him inside. A really interesting look at historical research, exhibits in museums and Black Inventions. I also enjoyed the language used here a lot, people have very different dialogues, and it makes for a very interesting chapter.
Tw: slavery, danger to children

At Rest: Journey to the Center of the Earth: A scholar of Black History holds a speech at a university for the annual Black History month, shortly after a young black man was killed by campus police. This story explores how an alternative universe, where slavery never happened, might work. It is a really fascinating concept and works quite interestingly with double consciousness. I also quite liked the descriptions of the university grounds, it felt quite haunted.
Tw: slavery, murder, rape

Dumas: This Land of Mine: This short story examines the death of Henry Dumas, a black author shot by police and justified through “mistaken identity”. The short blurs temporal lines between the narrator, who is reading Toni Morrison’s newspaper article about it twenty years later, and yet finds himself transported to the moment of Dumas’ death. After all, things haven’t really changed. This story is claustrophobic and haunted.
Tw: police violence, murder

Theft: A heartbreaking story exploring the double bind that Black men faced (and still face) in America during the Covid-19 pandemic as they have to decide between protecting themselves from getting sick or the heightened danger of being killed for wearing a mask. In this, a man accused of breaking the law (attempted theft) for following it (wearing a mask), finds something inside of him changing and he finds himself unable to follow the plan he has been following all his life to get through situations such as these. There writing here was really interesting and I found the long introduction really intriguing. It added a lot to this story.
Tw: implied police violence, murder

Tathāgata: A strange story about a man working in an office, who finds a painting that looks exactly like him at an art gallery. This story plays a lot with what happened/what was imagined and the timeline and made for an intriguing, but also slightly dreamlike read to me. I really enjoyed how it made me question what was going on and puzzle it out just as the main character did.

Appetite/Fever/Consumption: This essay is split into three parts examining media/performance that centers/commodified/sells Blackness. It starts with the movie “Sorry to Bother You” and the author’s initial reaction to it when seeing it in the cinema and how he stopped viewing it as a comedy and instead realized it as a mirror, then follows a Black man, who performs for a majority white audience trying to find a way to turn their white guilt int action but just becoming another Black body to devour and finally ends with an open letter the author was asked to write by his faculty. A really, really interesting look into Blackness as Commodity particularly in Academia and I really enjoyed reading it.
Tw: murder, cannibalism, n-word, lynchings

Epilogue: Nero – Toward a More Perfect Union: This essay before the story examines the swamp as a Black liminal space during slavery, where Black people can both be free, but not quite free, an “almost-there” place. The story itself follows the story of a burial place for Black people, their names forgotten as something happens during a ceremony.
Tw: lynching, mass murder, slavery

Unfortunately this book was a big miss for me and while most of that ties to the "shocking" twist at the end, there are also some other things that bothered me.
This book follows a private investigator Jo, hired to find her childhood best friend Rose, who has recently disappeared. The only problem is that said friend has stopped talking to her when she turned 14, except for a drug-fulled night to remember during Prom, and so our PI's information is not exactly up to date.
We dive deep into the Rose's life, from her various relationships (including one with a student at the university she was teaching at), her family life, the commune she lives on, her book publishing and her race-faking. All of this also leads us to explore our main character's life as she too grapples with her past and her relationship with Rose, including her relationship with her highschool boyfriend Tyler, who was the reason for their falling out.
I found the first 75% of the book to be mostly interesting and even though there is a bunch of genre-typical police positivity and a PI that mentions how scary it is to be shot at, when she worked as a police woman before, which felt weird ngl, the whole thing really went downhill when the big reveal happened. Before that my main issues with this story were that it was slow and the story's use of ableist language (calling an addict a j*nkie and using the term schizoid to refer to the weather), misogynistic language & asexuality equated to softness (calling a man a "pussy" for not being interested in sex) as well as the fact that the student/professor relationship heavily blamed the student for going along with it (since he was expecting a recommendation out of it.)
I did like the idea of a bisexual PI having to investigate her own past to solve a case and I liked that she's bisexual, but that was by far not enough to balance out the really bad ending.

Here be spoilers & discussions of csa & incest.

We find out that Rose has been murdered! By her own brother! But why? Well, isn't it obvious? As Rose was sexually abused by her father as a child, she made her two brothers reenact Jo's and Tyler's relationship and forced them to have sex and her younger brother, who was raped by his older brother, has now gone "psychotic" (actual word used to describe him. Looove the ableist language here so much!) and decided to kill everybody who was involved in that, including Jo & Tyler. Makes sense right? It's not completely out of the left field and with horrible depictions of abuse survivors to boot! Right?
While csa played a role in the story before, when we found out that Rose had been sexually abused by her father as a child (foreshadowed through mentions of her often sexual play with Jo), I did not see the end coming. And I hated it. It not only portrays abuse survivors as evil (because either you will rape your own siblings or you will kill everybody, even people who weren't directly involved. Sure.), it also does a disservice to the horrifying abuse that is cocsa. The older brother, who was made to rape his younger brother, even now calls him a pussy for not wanting to have sex and somehow, he is still the best character out of the three of them. The younger brother has decided murder is the only way to heal and has used the abuse to manipulate his sister through guilt. And the sister only shows remorse seconds before she's murdered.
While csa can absolutely make children hurt other children I do not think it was handled well here at all. It felt more like a convinient way to tie the story together and to be allowed to have a ~crazy~ murderer, whose actions cannot be predicted, because he's soooooo ~crazy~. He even murders a woman, who has helped him pull this whole thing off, just because.
Oh and in the end he dies. Because why would a life that's so messed up by trauma and abuse need any space to heal or get better or find a way not to abuse others or murder everybody? That's what trauma does, right? Hurt people hurt people, after all. Definitely one of the worse depictions of csa I've read in a while and I cannot believe this was published in 2024.
I also think the difference in depictions in differences between the brothers (the older one, who got to play the active role vs the younger one, who was not only forced to take on the passive role, but also forcible feminized, made to wear dresses and pretend to be a woman) is gross and falls in line with a lot of horror tropes of a male child being forced into femininity by an abuser only to turn around and become a monster. Again, not something I expected to see in 2024.


Trigger warnings:
examined in story: racefaking (claiming an indigenous identity), white feminism (claiming that a focus on BIPOC women somehow cheapens feminist solidarity), corrupt police, murder, child abuse, csa, incest, abuse between siblings, abuse between child and father
not examined: genre typical police positivity, a male student sexually exploited by a female professor and why he's kinda victim blamed for it, csa to explain why someone's evil, aphobic language, misogynistic language, ableist language towards addicts and people with personality disorders and psychosis, abuse victims who are murdered/killed