Scan barcode
A review by enkiiii
Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper
2.0
the generic cyberpunk worldbuilding and aesthetic made it hard for me to take the book seriously. That and the character writing made it read like unusually sexually explicit YA. The main heroine was kind of a girlboss and the whole theme of the work was bodily autonomy as far as i could tell, but she ended up pursuing a relationship with a woman, Doc, who's working for the institution that took away her bodily autonomy and had repetedly attempted to perform medical procedures on her against her will. When the two Characters started to cozy up to each other again I put away the book because i found that more repulsive than the tentacles coming out of Yaya's vagina.
I didn't find Doc's inner conflict regarding her affiliation with the institution that literally owns people's bodies worth exploring. Her dynamic with Yaya was really unsexy to me and i honestly wished Yaya would just kill her. Kill more people in general. I like books that explore women's rage but this one didn't take it far enough imo, especially for a horror novel. Yaya stopped someone who tried to subdue her in order to send her to a prison where she would be experimented upon, and then Yaya was like "oh no, she must have been so scared of me :(". As someone who's experienced a lot of discrimination in the healthcare system, I WANTED MORE BLOOD. I liked the body horror aspect of it. That's one of the few good things i can say about the book. The biology was creative, some of it was based on the real phenomenon of genetic chimerism.
But the pharmaceutical company responsible for the illness that afflicted the MC was too... generic evil dystopian corporation. It's literally called "alpha beta pharmaceuticals" and its board of directors is referred to as "The Board" in a classic YA dystopia fashion. I expected a bit more creativity there. A bit less apologism for the company's "goons". More rage in general. I didn't finish it because i lost all interest like 1/3 into the book when i realized that Doc was going to be one of the core characters and Yaya's love interest.
I didn't find Doc's inner conflict regarding her affiliation with the institution that literally owns people's bodies worth exploring. Her dynamic with Yaya was really unsexy to me and i honestly wished Yaya would just kill her. Kill more people in general. I like books that explore women's rage but this one didn't take it far enough imo, especially for a horror novel. Yaya stopped someone who tried to subdue her in order to send her to a prison where she would be experimented upon, and then Yaya was like "oh no, she must have been so scared of me :(". As someone who's experienced a lot of discrimination in the healthcare system, I WANTED MORE BLOOD. I liked the body horror aspect of it. That's one of the few good things i can say about the book. The biology was creative, some of it was based on the real phenomenon of genetic chimerism.
But the pharmaceutical company responsible for the illness that afflicted the MC was too... generic evil dystopian corporation. It's literally called "alpha beta pharmaceuticals" and its board of directors is referred to as "The Board" in a classic YA dystopia fashion. I expected a bit more creativity there. A bit less apologism for the company's "goons". More rage in general. I didn't finish it because i lost all interest like 1/3 into the book when i realized that Doc was going to be one of the core characters and Yaya's love interest.