Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Womb City

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Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

11 reviews

deszra's review against another edition

dark tense medium-paced

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

2.0

technically i stopped at 77% but i feel like i read /enough/ to justify a rating for this…
mb it’s an unpopular opinion to have liked the first half of the book but i was really invested in the world that Tlotlo Tsamaase had built and the way i thought the topics of memory, bodily autonomy, and the criminalization of female bodies were going to be handled. those two stars up there? are for the first like 40% of the book.
however…once the more horror elements came to the forefront it got real difficult for me to connect to the story. i’m sorry. ut Nelah and Jan are idiots, and even the reveal at the 60-70% mark doesn’t justify their decisions. also i feel like once That Event happened the writing suddenly took a turn for the worse, like Nelah didn’t sound like herself, neither did Jan, and the dialogue between them became so stilted and preachy almost? also i was STILL confused but couldn’t bring myself to care to do more than skim. i thought i could pull through and get to the end but uh…when a book leaves you feeling sick to your stomach THREE TIMES, dropping it is self care.

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ashley_tx's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

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

3.5

I really liked the premise of this novel and there were very clever plot twists. But there were many details like timelines that were confusing. And character actions were often over by the characters themselves explained in an unrealistic way.

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lattelibrarian's review

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challenging dark tense medium-paced

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

4.5

Wow, what a book. This one took me a while--the content was at times difficult and the world, complex. It's a true feat of a novel, one that involves dystopia, Afrofuturism, a conspiracy, and more.

Nelah lives in a world where you can live for nearly forever: your consciousness--though you may not remember previous lives--can be uploaded into bodies of people who have revoked their rights, or, as we discover, into bodies of people who have been trafficked for this very purpose. She's growing her baby in a lab, her husband grows increasingly suspicious, her award-winning work's money dries up, and her lover continues trying to convince her he loves her--despite his father being one of the most felonious men out there. When she accidentally hits a young woman one night in a drug-fueled bender with her lover, she decides to bury the body. After all, her microchip didn't paralyze her. But while she reckons with the guilt, she realizes that the young woman is haunting her in a very real way. In trying to stop this haunting, she uncovers a conspiracy that only an elite few are privy to and she wonders how to dismantle it all.

So, based on the above, this is clearly a complex novel. Don't forget, of course, all the world-building required and mentions of racism and sexism. But it's a genre- and gender-defying book that begs the questions: What is family? Who are we, really? How is justice meted out?

A riveting and impressive debut.

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jaz_gets_literary's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious tense medium-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? It's complicated

4.75

This book was a wild ride and I absolutely enjoyed every single bit of it. It covers so many topics so please check the trigger warnings before starting. The narration was so good. Some audiobooks you can listen to while you do other things, this is not one of them. While I did listen to this while at the gym and while working, my job is very repetitive. If you have to fully focus on something else while you’re listening to this audiobook, I don’t think you’ll get the best experience. It’s a lot of information and you have to pay attention or you will be confused. I saw that this was classified as horror and I didn’t see it until I realized that what is happening in this book is not that far removed from reality and that’s scary. I love already ordered the physical so that I can annotate it. There were so many moments in this book that I know that I’ll want to look back on.

Thank you so much to NetGalley for the advanced audiobook of this book. All thoughts and opinions are mine.

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feministy's review

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-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

4.75

So, I'm not 100% sure what I just read. I just know that I really fucking liked it.

There is A LOT going on here, but it all actually works. It takes a really skilled author to manage all of the threads going on here, but Tsamaase pulls it off! Xe writes both lyrically and succinctly when needed, and pivots pretty effortlessly between those two styles.

This was also more queer in the gender sense than I was expecting from the summary. There are numer us references to the construction of gender and the existence of non-binary, genderfluid, and intersex people.

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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!!!!

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luverbyrd's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

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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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laurareads87's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.0

Womb City is author Tlotlo Tsamaase’s debut novel; having previously read xer short fiction in a few anthologies (Africa Risen and The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction) I was very happy to read xer first longer work.

It is certainly a genre-bender – what starts as a dystopian sci-fi with themes of surveillance and biotech takes a turn toward fast-paced horror, with the end of the book feeling like an entirely different text than the beginning. It is also ambitious – there are a lot of themes here, and strong commentary on bodily autonomy, the relationship between memory and identity, and the ways that those harmed by patriarchy also serve to maintain it. I liked a lot about this. What didn’t quite work for me was how jarring the shift in tone is, and some of the pacing; toward the end, the pace was so fast that it definitely felt like a few too many ideas were squished in for the page count. Some parts felt a bit too information-heavy – the world-building is fascinating and complex, but in some places explained too clearly to the reader, resulting in ‘info-dump’ that often wasn’t necessary and disrupted the dialogue. All that said, though, I found the plot exciting and couldn’t put it down.

Content warnings: pretty much all of them – body horror, gore, blood, violence, injury detail, death, murder, gun violence, rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, drug abuse, death of a parent, suicide, misogyny, sexism, homophobia, medical content, medical trauma, human trafficking.

Thank you to Erewhon Books, Kensington Books, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.

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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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