How to even begin to review this book.....

There were a lot of things I really liked, and probably an equal amount that left me scratching my head. I see in many reviews that Khaw's use of profanity was quite contentious, but that didn't bother me. Khaw is very precise with language, and if there's profanity it's there for a reason.

The first 50% (or more) of this book is........??exposition??, without every REALLY telling us what happened before the book started. We know something awful transpired and led to the breakup of the "Dirty Dozen"- but not exactly what. And for all the exposition we wade through, there isn't a ton of world-building. We are following the reassembly of the remaining members of this origin-storyless crew, but we aren't learning a ton about the environment. Eventually we get a sense of what "minds" and "ageships" are- but I couldn't tell you what they look like or on what scale they measure on. There's a "Merchant Mind" and a "Butcher of Eight"- but I couldn't tell you much about them other than that. If that paragraph confuses you- maybe don't read this book.

What DID work for me was the interesting futuristic science surrounding the clones- being able to modulate the hormones and chemicals coursing through your body to modulate pleasure/pain. Lots of AI and data and augmented reality. There was some very cool stuff there, and Khaw's use of words is always on point (if you care enough to look up the various definitions you will inevitably need- I did.) It's very dense writing with a lot of wonderful observations, but I wonder if this book was more style than substance- particularly when it comes to storytelling. This was less of a story to me, and more of a VERY florid and verbose but quick look into a pretty cool future universe of Khaw's imagining. I'm still a fan.

This one just did not work out at all. I felt confused most of the time and just bored the rest. This is definitely one of those books that you ask yourself what in the world did you just read after you finish. Other than that I don't even really know what to say for this one.

The summary of this book really enticed me. The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khan had some main points describing a group of women getting back together to have one more adventure in a sci fi setting. But I didn’t even finish one fourth of the book before giving up trying to decipher what the author wanted me to get out of this adjective explosion. I read the first chapter several times to try to grasp the style of the writing and situation in which the reader is lost. The characters are presented with almost a stream of consciousness using words that even a well read person would have to check for meaning. Normally cyborgs and bioengineered humans are an interesting subject that I enjoy reading, but the run on descriptions that the author used here made it difficult for me to imagine the people in my mind. There is no warning for severe profanity, of which there are three f words on the first page. The general feel of this book is nasty and darkly depressing, I had no desire to find out what was going to happen, and I did not finish it. However, I appreciate getting the chance to try it from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

When I was thinking of a way to describe The All-Consuming World, the closest thing I could think of was Terminator plus Blade Runner, except queer and non-binary folks in space. There's also a good chunk of cyborg feminism. Which, I mean, if that doesn't sell you, then we have pretty different tastes.

The story is set in the distant future, where it seems the only remaining members of the human race are clones, and they live in a galaxy controlled by artificial intelligence called the Minds. With Khaw's design of clones in this universe, they can explore ideas of life and living outside the body: clones die and can be "uploaded" into new bodies, or even enter their consciousnesses into other AI. So, potentially, clones can be immortal, which allows Khaw to explore the philosophies behind immortality through several of her characters.

The book has several points of view, and I really appreciated how Khaw gave each of them a different "voice." I think they may have solved one of the problems of most multiple narrator books I read: typically, all characters still sound the same. Here, you can tell the difference between Maya, Elise, and Pimento before their thoughts are attributed to a name. There's even some experimentation in second person narration, which was fun.

I really enjoyed the exploration of gender in the book, as well. I don't want to say too much and spoil it, but have you ever thought about why we think certain voice traits are male or female? Me either, until Pimento muses on it.

Overall, this book was really enjoyable and engaging. It was hard to put down. It's not at all obvious what the ending is going to be until you get there. If you like science fiction with a good dash of horror, you will like this book.

I was provided an ARC from Netgalley for a fair and honest review.

Maya and the rest of the former Bad Bitches have grown older, more comfortable, and more vulnerable since their last heist on the planet Dimmuborgir. Why Ruby pulls them back together for one last heist, one chance to rescue their lost comrade, the team gets back together. What follows is a trippy adventure with unreliable narrators and constantly shifting ground. Truth, lies, and censorship blur together into a novel that keeps the reader off-balance yet still wanting more. Want to follow a group of old women on a dangerous mission to fuck things up? This is the book for you.

I really liked the sound of this book but unfortunately the writing just didn't work - disjointed, confusing dialogue, and lack of story direction, almost like a first draft.

I was so excited to be approved for the e-ARC of this book because the synopsis sounded exciting and intriguing. Who wouldn't want to read a book about cyborg, lesbian mercenaries battling against sentient spaceships? Apparently me. I struggled with this book from the very beginning because of the writing style. It seemed like the author had a thesaurus handy when writing the book because the words and language used were incredibly complex. It honestly felt like the author took a list of SAT words and scattered them throughout the book. This made the writing incredibly dense and difficult to read. As the story progressed, I enjoyed it more, most likely because I became a little more accustomed to the writing, but I never felt truly engaged in the story.

It also didn't help that the plot was nebulous and seemingly nonexistent for most of the book. The first 2/3 of the book focused on collecting the cast together without any real explanation for why it was necessary. Having finished the book, I'm still not 100% sure why it devoted so much time to introducing the characters at the expense of moving the plot forward at a more rapid pace. The action in the last third of the book was interesting, but the ending of the story felt like it was lacking a real climax and instead was all build up with little payoff. I walked away from the book feeling unsatisfied with the end, which is what ultimately kept this book from reaching three stars for me.

The world of this story was fascinating, and I enjoyed the world-building that was done. Unfortunately, there just wasn't enough of it. There was very little information about the society or how the AI ships became so powerful. There was also very little information about the humans or how/why the cyborgs became what they were. I would have loved to know more about all of those things and enjoyed the information that was available. The author did a good job of bringing the AI to life, and I would have loved to see their vision of the broader society in which this story was set.

There were some great character moments throughout the story that allowed for the exploration of some really interesting themes. I didn't find the characters themselves to be very relatable, but their circumstances provided a good backdrop for analyzing thoughts related to gender, love, death, and what it means to be human. The tackling of transhumanism and its impacts on the characters was one of the most interesting things about this book.

Overall, this book was not a very good fit for me. If you like your science fiction filled with dense writing, lots of profanity, complete immersion with little explanation, and slower in pace, you may like this one more than I did. I couldn't really get past the writing style and thin plot. Therefore, I rate this 2 out of 5 stars.

There was something about this book that was so off-putting for me to read. The concept was super interesting, but the end result ended up being confusing and just difficult to get through overall. I didn't enjoy the writing style and none of the characters (except maybe Pimento) were likeable at all. I felt like we were thrown into a conflict that was never really explained in a significant way. I feel like the idea could've been done really well, but this story was just not it for me.

Every year I seem to read at least one book where after I finish I have to ask myself “what the hell did I just read?” well this was my WTH book for 2021. I was really excited to read this; morally grey, angry and dangerous, sapphic cyborgs out to find their missing friend while under their own death warrant… I mean that sounded pretty damn cool to me. This wasn’t on my most anticipate list of 21, but this book was high up there of books I was excited to read. Unfortunately, this was not what I was hoping for and I almost DNF’d it a few times. The reason I still gave this 3 stars is that I enjoyed the second half much more, but to be honest I do wonder if I’m rating this a little high since I had no idea what was going on a good chunk of the time.

This is my first time reading Khaw so I was not prepared for her writing style. I don’t know if she always writes like this, or if this was a special choice for this particular book. It was very purple prose like, yet it was mixed with odd word choices, and ways to use them, plus a lot of profanity. While I don’t use swear words in my reviews very often, I have no issue with reading them in books. The problem is if you are going around constantly saying ‘fuck this you fuckity fuck’ the word loses its meaning and most of its power so I have to wonder what really is the point? I’m going to quote the opening paragraph of the book so you can get a feel of the writing style:

“The fuck am I doing here, Rita?”
Her voice is the boreal wash of moonlight upon the bulwark of their ship-in-orbit: a reduction of the fantastic, tepid when it could have been of a devouring temperature. It is modulated, disinterested. But like fuck Maya is going to complain. Any contact with Rita is superior to the absence of such.

I found most of the first half to be pretty rough. I had trouble realizing what was going on and I was getting bored in certain parts. I’ve noticed some other reviewers have mentioned this and I think they are right on; I don’t think this story works well as a book. I think if this was an original movie for Amazon or Netflix, then it would have worked so much better. I think visuals were desperately missing in this story. I couldn’t tell when we were on a spaceship or even a planet. I also could not get a clear picture of what the characters looked like in my mind. These are women and nonbinary characters that are half machines, yet there were only certain modifications of body parts that I could really understand. Instead of saying something like “she had clear tubes connected to her back slowly dripping spinal fluid –which is something I could picture in my head- instead it was more like ‘tubes dripping bile hanging out of orifices’. Well what orifices and what were the tubes like? There were just too many times that I felt like I didn’t have the complete picture of what was going on.

The reason I gave this, and what I’m thinking is a generous three stars, was because of the second half. The book picked up and honestly the character of Maya saved it for me. Khaw did something that we don’t see a lot of authors do in that one character was in first and the rest were in third. I actually don’t mind this as I like the idea of having the main character in first and the secondary characters in third so we could still peak into other POV’s if needed. The problem here was that Khaw wrote the main character in third and a secondary character in first. I don’t get that choice and I think it was the main reason that it took me a long time to even just like Maya. Had her character been in first from the beginning, I think I might have connected with her a lot sooner so the first half of the book might have been better for me. The good news is she did eventually win me over. She’s completely messed up and a bit of a psycho killer, but her character actually had some depth. Her character thought she was in love with someone she never should have been, which put her in a toxic dependent relationship, while her heart was really in love with someone she didn’t believe she deserved. Her messed up love situation gave her character some substance we as readers could latch on to. Not only that but she was the only character that seemed to have real, meaningful, and hard conversations with other characters. While Maya was threatening to kill them half the time, her character actually had some growth which seemed mostly due to these convos. One of her convos was with the widowed wife of one of her comrades, and it ended up being one of the best scenes and dialogs in the whole book. Maya was absolutely the reason I finished this book and even enjoyed a few parts in the process.

Unfortunately, this is not a book that I can recommend. I’m just barely rating this 3 stars and I still might lower it as I’m struggling with this rating as much as I struggled with this book. I loved the mix of all the sapphic and nonbinary characters, and the actual premise was good, but damn if I didn’t know what was going on way too often. I believe we don’t get enough sapphic sci-fi, so I really wanted to love this but it’s out there. If you think you might be okay with this very different writing style and you love sci-fi, then maybe it will work better for you. I would suggest reading a sample when/if there is one on Amazon to get a better feel if this might be for you.

Wow. This was a huge miss for me. The language was strange and not in a "i needed a dictionary" for this but in a "these are criminals and you chose that language".

The All-Consuming World is about a group of ragtag femme/queer ex-cons who are trying to fight to save one of their own.

I think.

It was really hard to read and understand this book. The prose was mega purple, and all the medical/scientific jargon was not well placed. And if I saw one more “fuck” I was gonna lose it. The inclusiveness of the book felt forced and put in last minute.

It’s possible I had a very early draft of this book and some of these things will be more cohesive in the final copy, but for now I’m going with a 2 star rating. I was tempted to DNF, but I really wanted to see how it ended. The 2 stars comes mainly because I really liked the plot. It was just not well executed at all.

Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for the chance to read this advanced review copy, but it was not for me.

Having read some of Khaw's horror (mostly short stories, but I would argue that's the best way to really get a taste for the writing style: when no words can be wasted), I knew to expect highly detailed and evocative body horror. What I didn't expect was just how... Wordy this book was. It reminded me of trying to read Turn of the Screw before The Haunting of Bly Manor came out on Netflix: I thought to myself "oh, it's a novella; shouldn't take long." Instead (and Khaw does the exact same thing but with way more profanity) each paragraph is 4x longer than it needs to be. Almost every sentence (even dialogue, which is absolutely criminal to me) was peppered with jargon and lists and just word vomit to the point where all forward momentum or necessary information was totally obfuscated by the sheer number of different ways to say "fuck".

I was looking for a scifi horror, but instead I got totally incomprehensible insults.

I'm really sad that I didn't enjoy this one, it was one of my most anticipated reads of the year. I feel like if you enjoy the writing of this book, you'll love it. Unfortunately, the writing really grated on me and overshadowed everything else I could have loved about the book. It felt like I was reading a thesaurus sprinkled with swear words. It felt like a struggle to sit down and read, to figure out who the characters were, or what they were doing. I didn't enjoy myself at all. It's such a shame because it seems to have everything I could have loved.

3.5 stars.
With every flesh-shredding bullet, Cassandra Khaw's main character Maya swaggers and shoots her way into and out of every situation she gets in in this wild, ultra-violent and spectacularly profane and fast-moving and sometimes impenetrable plot.
On the surface, this is a getting the band back together type stories, if your band is a group of women who happen to be clones, criminals, and have a serious case of "I hate you" for each other. It turns out there's a legit reason for the animosity as there's collective guilt and anger about the deaths of some of their group after their last job.
This time, there's a chance to recover one of their lost members, and we see how utterly dysfunctional and terrible the women's dynamic is. We also discover that there are vast artificial intelligences, whose intents are generally unknown and terrifying and inimical to, well, pretty much everything, and specifically to the group and their current job.

I love Cassandra Khaw's work. Her writing is beautiful and visceral, and often immersed in bodily fluids. However, I wish this book had been a little shorter, as I found the plot dragged in some parts. I was also a little mystified by some scenes (except for a wonderfully touching conversation Maya had with Rochelle's wife),
I love this author's writing--I see so many colours in her work--but, I also realize that Khaw's writing is not for everyone. Despite my slight difficulties with some of the action, I liked this.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Erewhon Books for this ARC in exchange for a review.

WOW. This was confusing. I liked the story. The dialogues doesn’t go with the characters.

It was a reading that I enjoyed a little.

I don’t think I’m quite the target audience for this author though I really enjoyed Food of the Gods quite a bit. They go for very bloody and spare no words in the descriptions of the consequences of violence. So if you like your science fiction grim and gory it might be a good choice for you. What I liked about Food of the Gods that I didn’t get here was there was an interesting main character to follow if not like. The characters in this book blurred together for me. The writing style was more about the action followed by the setting. For another reader that likes the action first and foremost this might be the right book.

An interesting premise hampered by confusing exposition, and a vocabulary in third person that does not match how the characters would speak.

What does it mean to be human ?

Casandra Khaw explores this in their new cyberpunk sci-fi novel following two people recruiting their old crew for a seemingly impossible heist. But of course literature has taught us that nothing is impossible. Nothing is smooth sailing, considering their final mission ended disastrously and their leader is much to blame. They must learn to work together again in order to save their old friend and pull off something that could possibly destroy them all.

I'm confident that my mind is just not developed enough to understand this book because WOW the potential of greatness that I can see, but can't seem to actually feel. Khaw has a very specific writing style that is a mix of high level vocabulary and vulgarity. In the end, these two elements are mixed together to create beautiful prose full of emotional highs and devastation. Still after finishing the book, I'm not sure where I stand with this writing style. I feel like I definitely have a more positive opinion on it and it makes me intrigued to read more from this author. There is an OVERWHELMING amount of quotes I tabbed.

Where my intelligence fails me is the confusion I faced reading the entirety of this book. I never knew where we were and most plot reveals didn't have much impact on me because I was still trying to figure out why it was so shocking in the first place. Especially that last reveal at the end. And when it came to Elise and Pimento's chapters... lets just say I was only reading words on a page and nothing else. I don't know if I can fault the author for this because this seems like a ME problem. I still liked the characters, especially Maya and Rita. I don't think I've ever read of a female manipulator character, so let's just say I understand why there are so many apologists now ahhh (and I do mean that lightly. Don't be an apologist). Rita is written so well that I felt fear myself when she entered the scene. Maya is a lovely character to get a perspective from because she's actually interesting and serves a greater purpose to the story vs. just walking through it.

I loved how queer it was. Verdigris is a genderfluid main/side character and I never knew this was something I wanted so badly to see on page. I also love seeing characters question humanity and whether they have it or not. Maya is battling this question the entire novel, often finding herself question her emotions. There is the ability to alter yourself with technology and it really pushes that idea if someone who is so altered can still be considered human. Honestly just a die hard of conversations like this.

I would definitely just check this one out yourself to see if it is for you.

HIGHLIGHTS
~It’s not ‘fellow clones’, it’s ‘sisters of another syringe’
~If you can shoot it, Maya will shoot it.
~If you can’t shoot it, she’ll shoot it anyway.
~Immortality doesn’t play nice
~AIs are dicks
~I will now read anything Khaw chooses to write

The All-Consuming World is a gemstone grenade of a book, and opening it up is the pulling of the pin; it explodes in your hands, all flashing jewelled shards cutting you to ribbons. Khaw’s prose is a deadly weapon, equal parts beautiful and brutal; the book they’ve written is every bit as hypnotic and dangerous as a siren with a machine gun. You can’t look away, you can’t stop, and you know it’s going to wreck you.

Why be beautiful when you can be seraphic instead?

The blurb for this one is fairly misleading; this really isn’t a heist story. Sure, it’s about getting the old team together for one last job, but the job is really not the focus – in the end we barely see it at all. The All-Consuming World is much more about the characters and their complicated dynamics than it is about anything else; it would be very easy to argue that there’s hardly any real plot – at least as we’re used to thinking of it – at all.

It’s just that that really doesn’t matter, because the book is un-put-downable regardless.

“You’re making a scene.”

“I can make some bodies instead if that helps.”

Maya is our more-or-less main character; the one in whose head we spend the most time. She’s a fist-full of broken glass, canines bared in a snarl, born with a gun in her hand (if not two), as deadly and dangerous to herself as she is to others. Fearless, reckless, rabid.

That’s why Maya is strutting into the bobbit worm’s jaws, with nothing but a ghost for backup, riding on a wing, a prayer, and enough combat know-how to win all four world wars.

I love Maya. I think it’s going to be hard for most readers not to love her. Because gods, is she broken, messed up to the core, and yet it’s not the kind of broken that is self-pitying or whining or any kind of grating. It’s a fierce brokenness, one that takes its shattered pieces and uses the shards as shivs, and Maya is just so compelling, so dazzling. She’s not a caricature or an empty archetype. She blazes. She is so absolutely not a tamed thing, and that is hypnotic even as you know that to touch her is to bleed.

a grin cocked like a loaded shotgun.

Maya used to belong to a mercenary group of clones who called themselves the Dirty Dozen; but most of the others went their own way long ago. Now it’s just Maya and Rita – Rita, the puppet-master, the tactician, the ruthless leader, who has messed with Maya’s biology to the point that Maya is literally addicted to her: serotonin rush when Maya follows orders, less-fun chemicals released when she doesn’t.

Rita served as their compass, a sun for murderers and no one else, lighting the road deeper into the country of sin.

They’re not romantically or sexually involved, but they come as a set. If Maya is the attack-dog, Rita is the master holding the leash.

But you can’t have a gun without a bullet, can’t take a shot without intent. Rita and her, they’re in this together. For good or for ill.

It’s a fucked-up, and therefore fundamentally interesting, dynamic. It’s horrible, it’s awful and painful and leaves the taste of copper in your mouth…it’s like a car-crash, a train-wreck, the kind of disaster you can’t look at and can’t look away from.

Until data corruption do they part.

As clones, Maya, Rita, and the rest of the ex-Dirty Dozen are functionally immortal – for a given definition of immortality. Their brain-maps, memories, and experiences are in some kind of cloud, some form of digital back-up, and if a body happens to die? No worries, just restore from the back-up into a brand-new meat-suit and you’re good to go! You can even make alterations to your next body, if you want, if there’s someone around to make the edits for you before you’re downloaded into your new brain.

But even with the back-ups, it’s still possible for things to go wrong. The reason the Dirty Dozen are getting the band back together is that Rita makes a revelatory proclamation: Elise, one of their crew who died badly, in such a way that there was no coming back…might have survived after all.

For a given definition of ‘survived’.

Rita claims that Johanna was uploaded into the Conversation – a kind of closed internet belonging to the Minds, the galactic community of AIs that exist in this far-future. Getting Elise back…is not going to be any kind of easy. Especially since the Minds have decided to hunt down not just the Dirty Dozen, but clones in general; and not just clones in general, but their families, and their originals, and the families of their originals.

That’s a lot of not-so-friendly fire to dodge.

Give her a gun, give her a war, give her bodies to line the floor.

If the part about Elise is even true. Nobody who isn’t chemically made to trusts Rita as far as they can throw her. But the possibility that it might be true is too much for the old gang to resist – because what if? – and so bit by bit, person by person, Maya and Rita draw them back into the fold. For one last big mission.

Hope the mind-killer.

I feel sorry for anyone who ends up reading this book in a physical format, because I would have had a hard time without the dictionary function on my e-reader: Khaw’s prose is wild and wonderful and it’s on you to keep up. I consider myself to have a larger-than-average vocabulary, and I was still asking the dictionary for word-meanings at least every other chapter. But I never felt like Khaw was trying to make me feel stupid. The words you’ve never heard before turn out to be perfect, to nail it, once you know what they mean – every piece clicks perfectly into place like a bullet into a chamber. It’s not pretentious, it’s musical, and the way Khaw uses language is pure magic – the old kind, the primal vicious bloody kind of magic. The All-Consuming World is fucking spellbinding, and a good chunk of that is the cast of fabulous queer persons – cis and nonbinary and genderfluid and all of them scintillating in their very different ways – but most of it?

Most of it is Khaw’s writing. The razor-sharp beauty of their prose. The flawless pacing, the sentence structure, the adjectives and images – it’s all perfect.

its cable looped around one iridescent arm like it is the snake from the Garden of Eve and Why-The-Fuck-Him-And-Not-Lilith

WHY THE FUCK HIM AND NOT LILITH INDEED

I want to call Khaw’s prose beautiful, but reading over all the parts of the book I highlighted, I’m not sure beautiful is exactly the right word. Maybe awesome, in the original sense (inspiring dread, terror, wonder, awe) and the modern one (fucking brilliant) is closer, better, more accurate. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Billy Martin, writing as Poppy Brite; Martin makes his horror novels so much more horrifying by using exquisitely beautiful prose, in essence seducing the reader into a sensual enjoyment of the terrible things that are happening – which is horrifying and sickening when you, the reader, realise it. Khaw’s writing feels similar: terrible things are happening, violent-vicious-awful things, but the scalpel-deft prose makes them beautiful, and described that way it sounds like there should be a dissonance, a contradiction for the reader. But there isn’t, because vicious-violent-awful and gorgeous-wonderful-decadent, the combination of the two, is the point. That’s how Maya views it all, which means the writing style? Isn’t jarring us out of the story; it’s pulling you deeper than should be possible into the main character’s mindset. It’s unbelievably clever, and it works.

That’s far from the only way in which Khaw uses language in insanely clever ways, though. There are very few writers who can create their own brand-new similes and metaphors, rather than relying on the tried-and-tested ones we all recognise – describing the moon as a pearl, for example – but Khaw is absolutely on fire with creation, connecting and comparing things I’d never think to put together, getting you in the gut or the heart will painfully perfect, genius imagery –

You could cut diamonds with her poise

Ayane looks like the last cold gulp of water before the sun goes supernova

a face like a veteran’s tall tale

And then there are the references; Judaic folklore, Greek myth, more I’m sure I didn’t catch all woven into the imagery, the metaphors. There’s the fact that every page roars with the queer-as-in-fuck-you! vibe. There’s the wordplay! There’s so many layers to it all, so many themes, and I cannot help but adore a book (an author) who doesn’t talk down to me, doesn’t slow down for me, expects me to be good enough to keep up. I liked having to look up what some of the words meant, okay? I’m weird like that.

I highlighted so many passages, folx. So many incredible turns of phrase, brilliant images, decadent description. I am in love with this book. I want to propose to it. I swear nearly every page made me swoon.

That is not to say that The All-Consuming World is without flaw. The abrupt ending in particular took me aback – I’m kind of hoping that there was at least one chapter missing from my ARC that will be present in the final copy, because it was like a missing frame in a film: jumping from point A to point G with the transition MIA. And although I personally don’t really care, I’m sure some readers aren’t going to be very happy that the whole book is build-up to a job that we barely see happen. There are a handful of lesser plotlines that kind of dissolve away into nothing without explanation or resolution, too.

But I honestly do not care. I’m here for Maya, for Viridion and Ayane and Constance and yes, because I love to hate her, even Rita too. And I am here for the prose that held me mesmerised from the first page to the last.

back when they were feral: hambering pejoratives, singing out curses, maenad-wild and gorgeous as a bullet flying true.

Before this, I had never read Khaw’s work before. They mostly write horror, and I am a total whimp about horror.

I don’t care. After reading The All-Consuming World, I will read anything Khaw writes.

Thank you to NetGalley and Erewhon Books for providing this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

CW: Abusive Relationships, Co-Dependency, Body-Horror, Amputations, surgeries, suicide

So, this was a weird one. It was not at all what I was expecting. I mean I liked it but there where just elements that again and again confused me and made me like it less. I’ll give it 3.5 stars.

I was expecting a high stakes action adventure with a crew of badass mercenaries. And this is that, but only barely. The story focuses more on the characters and their trauma, where they have been in the last 40 years and who hates who. The ‘plot’ is resolved in the last 30 pages or so. That did annoy me a bit since I myself normally prefer plot over characters and this book didn’t give me that. As always, this is just my opinion, your experience might differ greatly.

And I liked the characters. They are cool and bad-ass and queer and even though none of them are entirely human their motivations and feelings are very understandable.

Ok, now to the stuff that I didn’t like. Like I already mentioned, I didn’t lime that the plot very much took a back seat in this, I think the synopsis is very misleading.

Next: (This has to come with the info that I read an ARC and these issues might be fixed in the final copy) There are so many mistakes in this. Typos and just wrong words and mixed-up names. I really hope that issue will be fixed because it makes the book even more confusing.

What do I mean with ‘even more’ confusing? Let’s just say the writing is…very elaborate. Iknow English is my second language, and I am always prepared to not understand everything in a Sci-Fi novel but even then… this writing is just way to complicated. In some sentences I can’t understand half of what is being said. And it’s not just the normal Sci-Fi level of that. The word choices just seem designed to show of and brag that ‘look, I used a fancy word!’. It just annoyed me. I think that might be because the author used to write short stories, where very stylized writing like this can add to the intrigue of the story but in my opinion, it doesn’t really work in a full-length novel.

So, in conclusion: If you want to read a story about badass sci-fi characters and don’t mind a little confusion, check this out!