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A review by valjeanval
Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett
5.0
I'm really confused how this book was never on my radar. A multi-level sci-fi adventure love story through time inspired by the stories of Hadiran and Antinous? With aliens? I guess, judging a book from its cover, this small press story didn't look like much, and I probably would never have noticed it had my book club not chosen it. This is why I stay in book clubs folks.
The learning curve to getting into this story is steep, though. It's very hard to blurb, and any summary I found was vague and unsatisfying. Eventually, I just got into the rhythm of the structure of a series of vignettes, accepting that our main characters would change gender, age, orientation, and relationship every few vignettes or so. It's an ambitious, experiment of a novel, and I think the ending is a solid pay-off. If you are looking for some weird sci-fi and not intimidated by stories that don't even start letting you in on the secret until three quarters of the way through the book, give this one a try. If you are also a computer science geek or coder, I think this was written especially for you. I bet there are a lot of references in the code portions that I have no way of understanding.
The learning curve to getting into this story is steep, though. It's very hard to blurb, and any summary I found was vague and unsatisfying. Eventually, I just got into the rhythm of the structure of a series of vignettes, accepting that our main characters would change gender, age, orientation, and relationship every few vignettes or so. It's an ambitious, experiment of a novel, and I think the ending is a solid pay-off. If you are looking for some weird sci-fi and not intimidated by stories that don't even start letting you in on the secret until three quarters of the way through the book, give this one a try. If you are also a computer science geek or coder, I think this was written especially for you. I bet there are a lot of references in the code portions that I have no way of understanding.