Reviews with content warning for Domestic abuse - Womb City

Reviews tagging 'Domestic abuse'

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

9 reviews

embee007's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional fast-paced

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

5.0

I am a little girl. I am a monster.

This is an uncomfortable & unsettling read in multiple ways. The rules keep changing, the oppression & misogyny are stifling. You're constantly questioning if you misread something (you didn't), misunderstood something (again, no), or if things are really happening (time will tell...). You may pause to reflect on it, or let it settle, you may even reread a sentence or two, or a few pages. But then you're (hopefully) shrugging & moving on, right back into the murk. Push thru the uncomfortable & unsettling feelings - this book is absolutely worth it.

"The women always have to fall because of a man."

Is this book similar to A Handmaid's Tale? Yes, but that's putting it extremely simply. Becoming scientifically reborn/placed into a new body after each death means an unending Handmaid's Tale (nightmare).

“What is the point of immortality if you can’t fucking remember your past?”

I almost wish this were two separate books? Or a series of short stories. The concepts introduced were so ginormous, so dense, & so heavy. Before we get all the answers to our original (albiet small) questions, & we're moved on problems & questions that are so big in comparison that there's really no logical scale - we're comparing grains of sand to a planet. & then when we have planet-sized issues on hand, we're supposed to go back to caring about a singular human, & those grains of sand too? I want more expansion on so much, to give us smaller information bites to chew on & digest & appreciate, but I love how it was done regardless, & this book will haunt me for some time to come.

"It’s funny when something irrefutably terrible happens, and people say, “How can such a thing happen?” But evil flows where it flows. Through gaps and loopholes and human beings. Indifferent to legislation and policies."

The dialogue is phenomenal - I have so many quotes saved. This was by far my favorite part. I felt like I didn't understand where the plot was going for a short while, but it all came together.

"Why must we always die in order to be seen?"

I don't know who, if anyone, I can reccomend this to. Check the Content Warnings!!! I cannot stress that enough. I had been looking forward to this book for months & I finally got it from the library this month, but it was not the best timing for me - I pushed thru regardless. I do not recommend this tactic for everyone.

"Everything is easily rigged once you understand the system."

Representation: disabled amputee MC, MC with fertility issues, nonbinary or agender MC, mostly Black (Botswana) characters. Motswana MC (own voices)

“This is a very networked hell.”

Content Warnings

careinthelibrary's review

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adventurous challenging dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes

3.5

The last third was hard to follow but I was reading on a plane so I'm pretty sure that's the cause. Such cool worldbuilding and complex characters. Really compelling and interesting plot.

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planet_taffy's review

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-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

5.0

Womb City is a heavy book that handles gender politics and crimes against women in a deeply intersectional way. I was continually impressed with the new layers Tsamaase brought to the issue leaving no stone unturned in xer dissection of male privilege and the way it's used to enact violence on everyone else.

It terms of the sci-fi elements, Tsamaase's future Botswana is also full of layers from artificial immortality through "body-hopping" to the many tools of surveillance and control giving us the dynamic of second class citizens through "microchipped people". Xe is pretty good about explaining new technologies each time they come up so that, by the time they're super important to the plot, you're quite familiar with them.

All in all it's a rewarding read, even if the verbiage is a bit hard to get through on the first pass. Nothing in the book is a throwaway, making the ending one of the most satisfying I've read. My only complaint is that I wish less scenes had taken place in the car.

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shay43geek's review

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challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.75

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marxeism's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

3.0

An interesting story and exploration into feminist, queer, and class issues. Fast exciting parts interspersed with stagnant over expository sections that disrupted flow. Worth a read but could have been more polished

Content Warnings

thecriticalreader's review against another edition

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dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

Context:

I saw Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase on an anticipated releases list and thought it looked/sounded amazing, so I borrowed it from my library through the Libby App.

Review:

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase is the worst book I’ve ever read. There is a reason it has such a low aggregate rating on StoryGraph. It combines the worst elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror, thriller, and feminist rage literature with shitty writing. It’s a shame, too, because the cover art is amazing, and the description sounds sooo interesting. Before I start ranting about what I hated about it, I’m going to start with two positives:

· First off, there are some kernels of good ideas in here, somewhere amidst the trash.

· Secondly, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, this book isn’t bad. There are occasionally some sentences that are powerful and poetic. Unfortunately, you have to slog through pages of crap to get to them and when you do, they’re rendered meaningless by their context.

Now, for the bad. I don’t normally do reviews in bullet points, but I need some sort of organizational method to contain the rage I feel toward this book.

· The worldbuilding is overexplained, yet somehow makes NO sense. First of all, nothing that happens is remotely within the realm of scientific possibility. I would be fine with this if it weren’t executed so poorly. I venture to say that 1/4 of this book is exposition explaining the byzantine body-swapping process; it reads like a worldbuilding Google Doc rather than a novel. Tsamaase throws rule after rule at the reader and does so in the most inorganic way possible. For example, characters will stop and explain how their world works to each other with no good reason to do so. Despite the mountains of explanation heaped upon the reader, there are plot holes so big that you could drive a truck through them.

· Furthermore, the underlying foundation of the world makes no sense from a sociological perspective. The sort of technology described in this book would radically alter the human experience and society, yet Tsamaase demonstrates zero creativity in imagining these changes. Do you really expect me to believe that people are semi-immortal and can swap bodies, and this doesn’t meaningfully alter society in any way? This alone pretty much ruined the book for me.

· The characters are flimsy props for the plot, and they contradict themselves constantly. One character will say or believe one thing for the sake of one scene, but as soon as the author wants them to do something for the plot, they will do a 180 at the drop of a hat.

· The main character is a despicable, pathetic person whose motivations and actions make no sense. Like the other characters, she constantly contradicts herself.

She spends the first 20% of the book or so explaining how her every move and thought is monitored by her husband, and that if she wants to stay alive and have a child, she needs to be on her best behavior. As soon as she’s done explaining this, she promptly cheats on her husband and does a boatload of drugs. At another point in the book. she tells another character that her husband is a manipulative, abusive psychopath. She then acts shocked (imagine the shocked Pikachu face) when her husband later acts like a manipulative, abusive psychopath! These examples are just the tip of the iceberg with this character.

· None of the dialogue resembles how real people talk; characters speak in paragraphs. The dialogue is basically a tool for the author to infodump more worldbuilding lore, plot nonsense, and bland feminist outrage at the reader.

· This book tries so hard to be transgressive, edgy, and violent that it unintentionally has the opposite effect. The plot is fucked up, but that’s not a compliment.

· The book has no narrative momentum in the first half, and then it suddenly enters turbo mode. The plot is off-the-rails bonkers, and yet it somehow manages to be predictable. Tsamaase piles on clunky plot twist after clunky plot twist, and Womb City quickly starts to feel like ten seasons of a bad supernatural soap opera crammed into one book.

· The author has no understanding of how human bodies work and adds gore for the sake of gore. Let’s just leave it at that.

· In xer acknowledgments, Tsmaase says that that xer manuscript was rejected over 400 times. Xe claims it’s because of “gatekeeping,” implies that racial bias was involved, and complains that nobody appreciated the book’s “nuances” until it found the right people. Yeah, I’m gonna call BS on that. I know full well that racial bias and sexism are rampant in the publishing industry, but sometimes people rightfully reject manuscripts because they’re garbage. Womb City is a steaming pile of garbage wrapped in an alluring, shiny bow.

IN SHORT, DON’T BE FOOLED BY THE COOL PREMISE AND THE AMAZING COVER!!! DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME WITH THIS BOOK!!!!

Content Warnings

lauren_reads_outside's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book. This novel has so much potential; super interesting concept and world building and lots of gore. I was way more interested in the ghost's life than the MC who seemed to only be interested in defining her life around motherhood.
In the end it got bogged down with too much detail and repetition for me. There was definitely information that was repeated so often that I found myself going I know! when reading it for the third or fourth time.

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offtheraels's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

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

3.25

***Disclaimer: I was provided an electronic ARC of this book by Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.***

Womb City is a mixed bag of dystopia, scifi, and horror. The reader follows an architect named Nelah whose consciousness is able to be transferred to different bodies. Her current body is heavily surveillanced due to a crime a previous 'soul' committed and her marriage is in a fragile condition.

Nelah's infertility is a focus from the beginning of the novel, which leads to her and her husband growing their daughter in a government lab. When discussing infertility and as grief weaves in and out of daily life, the language becomes poetic and Nelah's humanity shines through.

“...how can I be free when my womb is a grave.”

“I am the Black Womb; everything I touch erodes.”

There are moments when the language is less poetic and more exposition and clunky phrasing. Some of this can be excused as a downfall of speculative fiction where world building can often appear expository. However, there are ways to do this without shifting the tone of the narrative. This is part of why I think the poetic language stands out so much—because it's often bracketed with mechanical language and scientific world building, so these moments of rhythm seem shinier and slower in comparison. Also, I would have liked to see the science fiction and horror elements blend a little more. I could feel the tone shift between the genres, but like I could between the poetic prose and the exposition. Though this could also be because I am more of a horror fan than a scifi fan, so I was more attuned to those elements of the narrative.

Nelah is a Black woman from Botswana, which grounded the narrative and gave the story a layer of nuance I thoroughly enjoyed. Major themes of the novel include the over policing and criminalisation of Black female bodies and what it means to be a woman living under patriarchal values and norms. For example, early on in the novel the reader learns that Nelah is a successful architect and the breadwinner in her marriage, yet her success and wealth do not equate to independence. Her husband maintains control in their marriage and is the arbiter of her surveillance.

“I stare at him and wonder if every marriage is like ours: microchipped wives watching our husbands disembowel our thoughts and memories, dissecting our every infraction, interrogating us about our glances, our clothes, our conversations. Monitoring us for undetected crimes.”

Content Warnings

libristella's review

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challenging dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

There were things I loved about this book, and other things that didn’t work for me. First of all, I think readers of thrillers will really like this book. As someone who prefers sci-fi and horror, I don’t think I was exactly the right audience. But, I did like many of the characters, I loved the feminism and ableism discussions, and I loved how things started all tying together in the last 20% of the book.

Among things that didn’t work for me was, firstly, the exposition that made the book seem like it would be a dystopian sci-fi novel. The sci-fi setting, themes, and tropes were all described in a telling rather than showing way, and were also unnecessarily complicated and confusing. I think this story could have been even more effective with the lifespan, consciousness-jumping, and wombcubator elements totally taken out, so a reader could focus on the microchipping, surveillance issues, murder trials, and supernatural elements without getting muddled and confused or slowing down the pace to try to explain. Ultimately for me, there was too much going on in the book to keep track of, especially in the first half, and it took me a while to discern which elements of the plot were most important. I think other great ideas, like the lifespan and consciousness jumping, could have been used in another very interesting story with different plot and issues.

Secondly, there were parts where the pace was clunky because characters would pause in the middle of a very tense scene to reflect on their feelings or on the past. I don’t think this was needed - some of the exposition, again, only complicated things rather than clarified, and the characters’ values and feelings were clear through their actions without the need for these reflective moments.

Ultimately I would recommend this book to thriller lovers, as the style reminded me of popular thriller books like Woman in the Window, Girl on the Train, and the Silent Patient - all books that also didn’t work for me but I know are well loved. I also am eager to read other work by this author even though this particular book didn’t quite work for me, especially since through the author bio, I learned that they have published several short stories. I’m looking forward to checking those out!

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