Reviews with content warning for Grief - The Seep

Interesting character driven story about a trans fmc existential journey after an alien invasion. Found the ending rushed and not great but I liked the rest of it. Relatable and intriguing. The world building was fascinating and well developed too. Really liked that the alien invasion wasn't what popculture usually displays as violent but was so with the slow, creeping influence of the seep until humans weren't willing to live without them. Was bone chilling in ways :)

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drlove2018's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A bit disappointed by the ending, but *wow* is this a ride! The first hundred-ish pages of this is the most exciting read I’ve experienced in a while

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cheye13's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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inamerata's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

My memories are who I am. You take away my memories, you erase me. Existence is memory. Do you understand? You’d kill me. You’d murder Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka, daughter of Rita and Samuel, a child of love. Trans woman. Artist. Doctor. Healer. Native American. Jew. You erase my memories, and you erase my lineage of ancestors—their pain, their triumphs, their passions, their dreams. No matter if the memories bring me pain. It’s my pain! Let me have it.

An interesting and sometimes frustrating read. I enjoyed the brisk writing, and the premise is neat. (How do you handle a ‘benevolent’ invasion? What do you do when your wife decides to use space magic to become a literal infant? What does utopia mean for people who don’t fall in line?) Porter digs into some interesting ideas about grief, intentions, relationships, memory, identity, etc. here.

Trina is an enjoyable protagonist; she’s dealing with internal and external angst, struggling to figure out what to keep and discard from her past, what to accept or reject from the weird new future. Sometimes she messes up, and sometimes she’s in the right railing against those around her. Honestly, I think Trina is in the right a lot more than she is not. Many other characters are pretentious, annoying, and/or just nonsensical, and it’s fun to root for her.

However, there were a few things that tripped me up. I’m still not sure how to describe my feelings toward the epilogue, where Trina’s actions made sense, but the narrative thought didn’t.

"Deeba had been right, of course, just as she always had been. It was brave and beautiful to go back to the beginning. Trina wasn’t ready yet. But she had plenty of time."

By The Seep’s own thesis, Deeba was wrong. She did kill herself by reverting to infancy, and she wanted her wife to either kill herself, too, or become her fucking mother. (Honestly, fuck Deeba.)

It is beautiful and brave to go toward a new beginning. The entire book builds toward Trina growing and moving forward with a clear head. Cursed with immortality, everyone in The Seep will have to choose when to end their current selves. So why is going "back" suddenly beautiful? How is being too chickenshit to speak plainly brave?

I also rolled my eyes at the painfully ignorant/reductive takes like "pets and eating meat are WRONG because we are all animals," especially because characters eat fish regularly. We also see carnivores, even obligate carnivores, still exist and are actively part of this society as sapient moral beings, but the story never engages with what that means for their diets. (Also, if you can see the life the wood that became your furniture...why no introspection on eating plants? Why isn’t a more holistic cycle of life brought up as at least one possible norm?)

Finally, it was odd to have a Native American protagonist whose indigenous identity is supposed to be climatically important, and then it's just never brought up outside her name and a single line. Throughout the book, we see Trina actively engage with all her other identities mentioned in the quote I pulled above, but we never even learn her tribe’s name.* In an invasion story set in North America, after the dissolution of the United States, Trina’s complicated feelings toward the Seep and its “utopian” plans never touch on what that means for her as a Native person. Which may be a good thing, as Porter is not Native American, but then why is Trina? Why in this story?

*In a 2021 Mechanical Dolphin interview, Porter confirms Trina was meant to be "Mohegan from the Connecticut area," and that she wishes she’d made that explicit. So, I guess Trina calling herself an "old wolf" might be a nod to this, but that’s not my place to decide.

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mandkips's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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