Reviews tagging 'Gaslighting'

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

13 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.”

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Grief, Gun violence, Infidelity, Murder, Rape, Sexual content, Violence, Vomit, Death of parent, Body horror, Car accident, Death, Gore, Self harm, Injury/Injury detail, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Emotional abuse, Suicide, Suicide attempt, Torture, Body shaming, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Forced institutionalization, Gaslighting, and Infertility

Moderate: Incest, Medical content, Racism, Ableism, Confinement, Panic attacks/disorders, Body shaming, and Pedophilia

peachani's review against another edition

challenging dark tense fast-paced

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

5.0

I only wish that the

comeuppance

deaths were more gory and protracted. It's what they deserved... Hmm. Maybe I relate to

Moremi

more than I initially thought. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death of parent, Trafficking, Misogyny, Violence, Blood, Murder, Sexual content, Gore, Infertility, Infidelity, Injury/Injury detail, Sexism, Body horror, Car accident, and Death

Moderate: Trafficking, Cannibalism, Body shaming, Cursing, Drug use, Rape, Gaslighting, and Sexual content

Minor: Gun violence, Incest, Pedophilia, Alcohol, Deportation, Kidnapping, Vomit, Child death, Sexual harassment, Suicidal thoughts, Cultural appropriation, Deadnaming, Emotional abuse, Ableism, Cancer, Confinement, Lesbophobia, Pregnancy, Self harm, and Transphobia

poisoned_icecream's review

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad 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

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death of parent, Grief, Infidelity, Injury/Injury detail, Gaslighting, Misogyny, Sexism, Sexual content, Blood, Sexual assault, Death, Drug use, Infertility, Car accident, and Gore

Moderate: Pregnancy, Incest, and Miscarriage

pm_me_book_recs's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad 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

3.5

 I almost didn't finish this one, the beginning is a bit of a grind. I also had a tough time with the extensive and weirdly timed internal monologues that really info-dumped the reader.

I did like the setting, concept, and progression of story and conspiracy- but the characters were a little flat or relied too much on the plot for development? Some decisions felt forcibly poor, like I feel no one with a concept of cause and effect would make the choices that happened in this story. Once the plot picked up, it was a wild ride and action packed, and as I said, full of conspiracy and also incorporated Botswanan mythology/pantheon. There are very lengthy interruptions of internal monologue, however, that at times had me struggling to remember what was even happening before it started.

Like a combination of Altered Carbon, Handmaid's Tale, and The Truman Show. Major commentary on bodily autonomy and misogyny, class privilege, but much of it got lost in the action.

I listened to this ALC via Libro.fm and thought Cristel Mutombo did a great job, her voice is dynamic and it was easy to differentiate between characters, she is super emotive!

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Car accident, Drug use, Grief, Death of parent, Gore, Infertility, Injury/Injury detail, Medical trauma, Fire/Fire injury, Infidelity, Sexual content, Classism, Dysphoria, Emotional abuse, Mental illness, Sexual assault, Violence, Alcohol, Body horror, Forced institutionalization, Blood, Cursing, Death, Gaslighting, Murder, Rape, Stalking, and Suicidal thoughts

Moderate: Gun violence and Transphobia

careinthelibrary's review

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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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Infidelity, Violence, Gore, Gun violence, Misogyny, Blood, Car accident, Child death, Drug use, Alcohol, Death of parent, Injury/Injury detail, Murder, Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, Sexual content, Body horror, Gaslighting, Pregnancy, and Sexism

Moderate: Sexual violence, Sexual assault, and Trafficking

planet_taffy's review

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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Content Warnings

Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Body horror, Misogyny, Drug use, Infertility, Infidelity, Sexual violence, Domestic abuse, Blood, Death, Sexism, Death of parent, Violence, Car accident, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Gore, Grief, and Murder

Moderate: Physical abuse, Rape, Miscarriage, and Child death

Minor: Kidnapping and Pregnancy

These are pulled from the frontmatter of the book. Sensitive topics are used with purpose, but there is quite a bit of gore & body horror.

shay43geek's review

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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Content Warnings

Graphic: Car accident, Domestic abuse, Alcohol, Death of parent, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Blood, Bullying, Body shaming, Death, Body horror, and Drug abuse

Moderate: Infertility, Misogyny, Gun violence, Infidelity, Murder, Gaslighting, Gore, and Physical abuse

Minor: Sexual content, Sexism, Sexual harassment, Toxic relationship, and Sexual violence

marxeism's review against another edition

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

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Classism, Misogyny, Child abuse, Murder, Car accident, Blood, Death, Gaslighting, Rape, Sexual assault, Infertility, Injury/Injury detail, Slavery, Body horror, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Sexual violence, Gore, Self harm, and Miscarriage

2treads's review against another edition

challenging dark fast-paced

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

2.0

Tsamaase has something here with this futurisric, dystopic-touched novel. But what fatigued me with this one was the bloated plot tgat tackled too many societal themes without giving me the satisfactionof querying and exploring them fully to be affected. Throuh what feels like diary entries more than intercations and converstaions we are shown a society that has essentially imprisoned women in surveillance-heavy relationships or just by existing. 


The onus of violece and criminal behaviour has solely been placed at their feet and they have to undergo invasive mind sweeps every day as well as being profiled after a certain period to ascertain their level of commiting a criminal act. Here we are looking at body autonomy, violence, intimate partner surveillance, patriarcyy, state surveillance and overreach; all in the name of protecting the women and by extension their families. 


Along the way we drip into sexual abuse, trafficking, sexual exploitation, forced sex work through mind control, brief mention of ancestral beliefs, rape, reproductive shaming, economic and political corruption all wrapping their tentacles around this plot, this strangling my enjoyment.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Death, Violence, Death of parent, and Murder

Minor: Gore, Rape, Grief, Misogyny, Lesbophobia, Trafficking, Gaslighting, Sexual violence, Sexism, Drug use, Injury/Injury detail, and Sexual assault

thecriticalreader's review against another edition

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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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexual violence, Injury/Injury detail, Physical abuse, Sexual content, Suicide, Body horror, Gore, Grief, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Kidnapping, Sexism, Sexual assault, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Colonisation, Fire/Fire injury, Gun violence, Infertility, Suicidal thoughts, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Medical content, Child death, Cursing, Medical trauma, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Blood, Classism, Car accident, Alcohol, Stalking, Death, Emotional abuse, Racism, Murder, Rape, Torture, Death of parent, Suicide attempt, Gaslighting, Infidelity, Pregnancy, Toxic relationship, Trafficking, Police brutality, and Xenophobia

Moderate: Transphobia, Incest, Ableism, and Homophobia