A review by lines__lines
Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente

mysterious slow-paced

3.5

The city of Palimpsest is breathtaking in its imaginative scope - truly a world made of some of the weirder parts of dreams, while still working as a functional place. Reading this book feels like dreaming at times, and it is slow to gather its threads of plot together between the four main characters, but there is weight and substance within the dreamy strides of the narrative. It ends up giving a lot of thought to borders and how we patrol them, both personal and national. For a book about a sexually transmitted city, this is a relatively un-sexy book, since the sex becomes a means to an end, and there's certainly some questionable choices about pairings and a lot of unhealthy behaviors overall. This is the kind of book that might benefit from a re-read to pick up on what I suspect are some more symbolic choices in settings and such. I'm not sure it was quite compelling enough, for me, though to want to read it again, and I'm not sure that it quite figures out exactly what its own theme is, though it plays with many ideas from addiction to immigration. I will certainly seek out some more of Valente's work, though.

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