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maeverose's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
inspiring
fast-paced
3.75
This book is unlike anything I’ve read before, and has many elements that I love. Biocyberpunk describes this perfectly. I would say it’s a mix of fantasy and sci-fi. It’s formatted in a unique way, with one main story and four connected short stories throughout. Most of it is in traditional prose, with some parts written almost like poetry and one of the stories is epistolary. The writing is descriptive without being flowery.
I’d strongly suggest checking content warnings for this before reading. There is an authors note at the beginning that covers the big ones: an on page completed suicide, and self harm. But I’d also add gore, body horror, and injury descriptions as significant ones. (I go into more detail in the content warnings section)
what I liked:
what I liked:
-the idea of a gallery of mementos that each hold a memory is such a fun concept. I would love if S. Qiouyi Lu wrote a companion anthology of more stories from this world
-the world building was really creative, and I liked the way Ora was described (especially in the night market scene)
-the casual use of neopronouns, and all the non binary/trans characters.
-the exploration of oppressive and unfair systems
-I really liked the parts about identity (specifically these quotes: “-æ has gone by “Anima” for longer than æ ever used ær birth name. Does ær terminal name apply only to the Anima that exists after becoming a node, or does the name encompass even the world before that transition?”
“We will never know who someone else truly is. We are still bounded by the limits of the material world. We still cannot enter someone’s soul to navigate the interior sea of the mind. But we can take a moment, a story, that illuminates their spirit, if only one facet. Yet that is what makes life the brilliant gem that it is: the collection of all those facets into a prism. A lens.”)
-also I’m obsessed with this cover.
-the exploration of oppressive and unfair systems
-I really liked the parts about identity (specifically these quotes: “-æ has gone by “Anima” for longer than æ ever used ær birth name. Does ær terminal name apply only to the Anima that exists after becoming a node, or does the name encompass even the world before that transition?”
“We will never know who someone else truly is. We are still bounded by the limits of the material world. We still cannot enter someone’s soul to navigate the interior sea of the mind. But we can take a moment, a story, that illuminates their spirit, if only one facet. Yet that is what makes life the brilliant gem that it is: the collection of all those facets into a prism. A lens.”)
-also I’m obsessed with this cover.
some (very subjective) dislikes:
— some of this definitely went over my head. The world building is really cool but admittedly confusing for me at times.
— I don’t care about sports at all so I skimmed most of ‘This Form I Hold Now’, but I liked the rest of that story (and how it connected to the third story)
— I don’t care about sports at all so I skimmed most of ‘This Form I Hold Now’, but I liked the rest of that story (and how it connected to the third story)
— I didn’t care for the knife play stuff in the last story. It felt out of place imo. It also bothered me that Ellen just completely forgot about the mermaid in her bathroom… like did that really not cross her mind the whole way there?
— this barely counts as an actual dislike: Of course with a novella you can only fit so much, and I feel that this book achieved its goal in telling the story perfectly fine. But with novellas in general I’m always left wanting more. This world is so cool and vast that I want to see more of it, learn more of its history. I want to see where Anima’s story goes from here, I’d like to learn about Vessel’s life, how se collected all the mementos. As I mentioned, I’d like more stories. I would love if this became a series of companion novellas or something.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Self harm, Injury/Injury detail, and Suicide
Moderate: Body horror, Fire/Fire injury, Death, Blood, Gore, Sexual content, Medical content, and Animal death
Minor: Cursing, Excrement, and Murder
Needles, drowning. Self harm: a scene of someone cutting their palm, graphic depictions of foot binding, and a knife play scene. In the latter the person being cut has very explicit thoughts about the desire to be cut. Gore: there are two scenes with gore in them that I can think of. The first is in ‘A Death Made Manifold’, that one is relatively minor imo. The second is in ‘As Dark As Hunger’, which is bordering on graphic. It more so describes graphic injuries than actual guts (though there is brief mention of that too, both fish and… human-esque), but it’s still uncomfortable to read.
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