What an absolutely wild, soulful, hilarious, confusing ride of a book!

This is my first try at a 'genre-bending' novel that played around so consistently with form and I won't lie, it was both exciting and disorienting. Think This Is How You Lose the Time War but on crack and with transgender main characters (!!). But I think the disorientation adds so much to this story - it was like a breath of fresh air to not immediately understand everything about the universe(s) we're thrown into, and to just trust the author to do her thing and let the story unfurl.

Acrasia is also such a compelling, witty main character that, despite feeling lost at times from the non-linear storytelling, I wanted to stick around anyway to hear all of her endless footnotes and references. More than once I was grinning to myself over the playfulness of not only our MC but the form of the book itself, particularly in representing her cousins and any other time-space-bending parts of the story.

I cannot wait for the physical release to see how this maps over onto page, and would buy a copy in a heartbeat as this is definitely a book worth a second read. It was also great to look up Violet Allen after finishing Plastic, Prism, Void to realise I'd just (this month) read and loved her short story The Other One in the Out There Screaming anthology.

A book that's great if you love sci-fi (as I wouldn't ever consider this a romantasy) non-linear narratives/forms or if you're looking to get out of your reading comfort zone.

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Original rating 4.5 but rounded up to 5 on NetGalley.

Loved how prescient and incisive this was, while also being absolutely hilarious. What Allen does with form here is superb and the book never felt confusing to me even through all of the twists and turns the narrative takes. Would absolutely recommend this in a heartbeat to anyone who wants more from their fiction than just a collection of cookie-cutter tropes and placid diversity. This is the real thing, baby.

Plastic, Prism, Void is a time jumping, perspective hopping magical girl story with a darkish twist. The prose is indescribable and unfaltering, ensorcelling the reader with every turn of phrase. As for the characters, they are an absolutely delicious shade of grey; the epitome of moral complexity and lovability.
This was an absolutely scintillating read, and I absolutely be sticking around for more of Violet Allen's work!!
Thank you to LittlePuss Press for providing this book for consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Plastic, Prism, Void is a wild ride of a romance sci-fi literary fiction adventure through form and one messy relationship. Acrasia is a magical trans girl who comes across as pretentious. Opus is a mech-piloting trans guy. They were enemies, but then that changed, and then their universes separated. Now they're back in the same place again, but Acrasia's schemes to keep Opus there might be finally going too far.

I love the publisher, LittlePuss Press, and the blurb fascinated me as (apparently) a romantasy with shades of House of Leaves. Plastic, Prism, Void takes the textual form experimentation of House of Leaves, the sci-fi romance of This Is How To Lose The Time War, and mixes them both with a healthy dose of pretentious references and a complicated relationship between two trans people with weird baggage. It took me a little while to settle into the style and the way the narrative jumps around in time and voice and format (and the advance copy I read on a too-small screen didn't help so I think the physical book will be much easier to read), but then I became invested in the central relationship. I like the way that, despite everything else going on, it boils down to people who didn't like each other but then fell in love and now can't work out if they can sustain something when they're both in the same place. So, despite the fluid, mind-boggling narrative, it is also something strangely relatable.

I'm sure there's great swathes of this book that I didn't get, but that feels like some of the point of it, with Acrasia and Opus's banter often being about whether or not they get each other's references (made more complex by the multiple universes). This is a book that is pushing boundaries in a fun way and you don't need to understand every sentence to have a good time with it.

Plastic, Prism, Void is unlike anything I've ever read. While I was reading this, I saw one of those daily book questions of: 'if your current read was a drink, what would it be?' and my answer for this book is: a multi-layered cocktail that is set on fire.

Plastic, Prism, Void is disorienting and nonlinear. The main character is not likeable; she is 'spiky', incredibly pretentious and talks constantly in classical + pop culture references. It is chaotic. But this book is fully aware of what it is and who the characters are and by the end, I even found a rhythm in the mid-sentence time jumps. This is definitely not for everyone, and heads up - this is only Part One*, but if you like experimental books, books that play with format and the fourth wall, go pick this up. I look forward to Side Ω.

*Some people might call this a cliffhanger ending.

Not everyone will love this book, but I did. It took some getting used to and even then the writing gets switched up sometimes. But that is the whole premise of the book.
It was so much fun to read, even when it got a bit confusing. There is quite a lot of fourth wall breaking, which normally would take me out of the story, but it worked so incredibly well here.
The story felt a bit like a rollercoaster at times, but I didn't want to stop riding it.
I am so curious about the second book. I suspect it will be a wild ride.
Definitely a recommendation if you want something queer, fun and unique.

I gave this 4.25 stars on Fable, so I'll have to mark it 4 stars for NetGalley.

Thank you to NetGalley and LittlePuss Press for letting me read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Plastic, Prism, Void is a tremendously fun and inventive novel that utilizes Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Anime pastiche to tell a sweeping T4T love story that spans multiple universes. Acrasia is a Black trans poet who hides her sensitivity and fears behind erudition (some might call it snobbishness); she is also a butterfly demi-goddess with magic shadow powers who’s trying to mend fences with her cousins/sisters/fellow butterflies after lowkey attempting to destroy the world. Opus Zhao is a Chinese trans fuckboy with a smart mouth, charm that belies his misanthropic tendencies, and an allergy to romantic commitment; he is also the part-android pilot of a giant tiger robot, engaged in a war to save his world from alien invaders, and he lowkey used to help Acrasia in her attempts to destroy her world. Acrasia and Opus hail from different universes, and it’s only when their universes intersect that they can go on dates. The arc of their romance is not quite Enemies to Lovers; more like Co-Enemies (fighting the Good Guys in both their universes), to Frenemies (the barbed banter in their Frenemy stage would fit right in with classic screwball comedies), to frustrated Lovers, and the romance unfolds nonlinearly as the story begins with them already in the Lovers stage. The alternate reality created in the Venn Diagram between their universes is unstable, creating gaps in the timestream that send them both back to various points in the past, and the narrative of their love story is told through these jumps in spacetime. With the gaps between their universes’ collisions growing longer (according to Opus’s calculations, they might not meet again for twenty years), Acrasia is determined to get married, through a magic ritual that might allow them to permanently be together but which threatens to destroy both their worlds.

While the story unfolding in the novel’s present finds our characters at a moment of relative peace—Acrasia is no longer fighting with her cousins/sisters/fellow magical girls, and Opus’s days of fiercest combat seem to be behind him—the backstory is, putting it mildly, complex. Much of the plot’s action takes place in the past, allowing the novel’s present to concern itself with the question of whether or not these two lovers will end up together. The nonlinear storytelling makes for a timeline that is occasionally mystifying, requiring the reader to have patience, but Acrasia’s voice was strong and endearing enough that this patience never felt like a chore, and I enjoyed the narrative complexity even when my answers about the worldbuilding or plot mechanics weren’t immediately answered. Also, the confusion felt like the intended effect of a purposeful and precise author: Acrasia is a postmodern protagonist, aware that she’s a character in a novel and gently poking fun at the reader’s assumed confusion, frequently breaking the 4th wall to address us directly (including an extended and hilarious metatextual joke about Goodreads). The reader’s involvement turns out to be necessary to Acrasia’s spells, though I won’t spoil how.

I fell in love with the character of Acrasia, who is by turns pretentious (with as many footnotes as this novel boasts, she stubbornly refuses to entirely explain all the literary references she drops) and disarmingly vulnerable, open with the reader about her emotional problems and how they contributed to her villain arc. She’s sharp and insightful when she opines about identity issues (Black, trans, and otherwise) and the literary scene--she calls her most successful work her “mammy poem,” and though it’s not included in the text, we understand it to be the kind of identity-focused overtly political work that you can just picture going viral on Instagram. I loved how her character allows this novel free-reign to go beyond its Sci-Fi/Fantasy constructs to commentate on real-world concerns. Opus is not realized with quite the same depth (this novel is first and foremost Acrasia’s story), but we still learn about his relationship to transness and to his former lesbian identity, along with his Daddy Issues—backstory that is both fitting for the anime pastiche that provides his universe, while also coming across as empathetic and unique to him. This novel wouldn’t work if the romance didn’t work, and their relationship is just as thorny and intense as befits a character like Acrasia. From their first interaction on the page I was rooting for these crazy kids to find some way to make it work, the fate of two universes be damned.

Without spoiling it, the novel’s ending leaves room for a sequel, which I hope Violet Allen is writing. It’s refreshing to read a T4T romance with this kind of epic scope and literary ambition—I can’t not love a Romantasy protagonist who quotes Clarice Lispector, Vladimir Nabokov, and William Faulkner, to name a few. I’m deeply invested in these characters, and I hope to see more of Acrasia and her friends/lovers in future books.

First off - props to whoever did the formatting work for this digital book, the frequent color, size, style and even how the text is conveyed changes rapidly, sometimes multiple times on the same page, and it had to be a hell of a job making sure it stayed intact on the conversion to digital files. We get a hell of a swing of a debut novel about a situationship between a transmasc mech pilot and a fallen transfemme magical girl, about the desperation you feel in your own life sometimes and the escapes you try to make with the tools you have at the time, only to find out years down the road that maybe this thing is toxic for the both of you. I loved the way Allen plays around with literary style and formatting a lot, and I may have been cheering for Acrasia out loud by the end of the book. Allen is almost gonzo in her descriptions of what unfolds here, and I may be going and reading her backlog after finishing this. Pick this up when it comes out in May, it's a hell of a ride.

This book is so cool., it's narrative is cool, it's setting is cool, the creative ways it utilises font, images, and everything in between is cool. This definitely is going to be a niche book that people will either love or hate, lots of creative liberties are taken with the physical pages themselves, for me this works very well, I love a book that has fun in its bones, and this book has it. The story is dramatic and wild too, I really enjoyed my time here and I'm very excited for other folks to find and love it too!


I will say like some other folks on here some formatting errors kept cropping up for me, but I did get to mostly enjoy my time error free!

This was either the best or the worst book that I’ve ever read, and I truly respect a piece of art that can make you question that.

I'm not someone who typically has a lot of patience for books, movies or music that can be described as experimental. I would love to be that type of person, but oftentimes that kind of experience can make me feel like I'm missing something, or like there's something wrong with my brain. This book should've come under that category, because it is unlike anything I've ever read before, but every page felt worth it. It was a confusing journey that I don't think I can describe to anyone else, but it was confusing in the best way possible. As soon as I was done with the book (or a few minutes later because I needed to process the ending first), I had the urge to reread it so I could understand it on a deeper level. I'm not usually like that, so being this engrossed in something I didn't fully understand felt really special.

This book is so unique and imaginative, in its form, its characters, in things as basic as its genres. I had no idea where the plot was going at any given moment but I loved every second of it. I adored how the structure was played with in a million different ways throughout the book, but with each change making sense even as it messed with your brain. The characters were really the heart of the book, as they're all so interesting and witty and their own people.

My tiny issues with the book were that the pacing felt a little off at times and I thought that the ending was missing something to wrap everything together more tightly. However, that could very well be a me problem because I'm not used to reading this kind of thing and it did take me a little while to get into the flow of the book. I'm still waiting to have enough free time to get a chance to reread this!