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A review by reaperreads
Your Mind Is a Terrible Thing by Hailey Piper
3.0
A little greater than three stars, but not quite four.
I really like the premise of this: the personification of anxiety as a giant brain monster attacking you in the spaces where you should feel safe or at home. I thought it would be campy in the bad way, but it was campy in the good way. The writing felt very genuine too, which balanced out the absurdity of everything that happened. I think roughly the last third of this novella was my favorite because the pacing all at once felt like it accelerated and had room to breathe, which was potentially helped by the solid integration of exposition into the climax.
The first chunk of this book, however, was very tough to imagine. I'm glad Hailey Piper provided a layout of the ship at the beginning cuz I would have been lost without it. I loved the addition of psionic abilities because I'm a huge fan of Octavia Butler's Patternist series, but the usage of color to describe when psionics were being used was, while cool, not enough for me to grasp what was going on.
All in all, though, this novella had some great scares and some brilliant world-building, the latter of which I can imagine was tough to do in such a small page span. Like, the wraiths? C'mon. What a cool hecking concept. Can't WAIT to read more from Hailey Piper. I just checked out two of her other books from the library, so hopefully I'll be able to get to those soon.
For fans of: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark, Mind of My Mind by Octavia E. Butler, Providence by Max Berry, and probably anything by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)
I really like the premise of this: the personification of anxiety as a giant brain monster attacking you in the spaces where you should feel safe or at home. I thought it would be campy in the bad way, but it was campy in the good way. The writing felt very genuine too, which balanced out the absurdity of everything that happened. I think roughly the last third of this novella was my favorite because the pacing all at once felt like it accelerated and had room to breathe, which was potentially helped by the solid integration of exposition into the climax.
The first chunk of this book, however, was very tough to imagine. I'm glad Hailey Piper provided a layout of the ship at the beginning cuz I would have been lost without it. I loved the addition of psionic abilities because I'm a huge fan of Octavia Butler's Patternist series, but the usage of color to describe when psionics were being used was, while cool, not enough for me to grasp what was going on.
All in all, though, this novella had some great scares and some brilliant world-building, the latter of which I can imagine was tough to do in such a small page span. Like, the wraiths? C'mon. What a cool hecking concept. Can't WAIT to read more from Hailey Piper. I just checked out two of her other books from the library, so hopefully I'll be able to get to those soon.
For fans of: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark, Mind of My Mind by Octavia E. Butler, Providence by Max Berry, and probably anything by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)