Loomverse is a literary wonder. The novel has unique fantasy elements and I think fans of Rachel Gillig would also like this book.

Lira is a Threader in a world where the Threaders create the fashion and mold the world through their designs. However, Threaders must remain blind to their creations by law and are not allowed to look at their finished products. Avoiding seeing her creations causes discomfort in Lira, and this makes her unsettled and pushes her to seek out the truth. However, curiosity is not only discouraged but dangerous, and her quest to discover the truth has consequences of its own.

The overall story and how the world worked felt very deep and complex, which made it difficult for me to follow at times. I had many questions throughout reading, and while I have a better understanding after finishing the book, I'm still trying to puzzle through how things worked. I wanted to know more about the House and understand what was happening in the world around Lira. I didn't connect much with the other characters in the novel and wish I would have understood people like Cassian better. I really liked Thimble as a character but I want to know more about his past. Overall, the book is beautifully written and kept me engaged, but I felt a little lost at the end of it.

Thank you for this ARC of Loomverse. I’ll start with that I thoroughly enjoyed the theme and premise, it was original and exciting, and not something I have come across before. It is so easy for science fiction/fantasy to become an endless trope of the same thing regurgitated, so this was refreshing and exciting.

However, for myself, this book had too little structure and “meat”, for lack of a better term, to itself. The pace was so fast, we were flung into this world and throughout the story in a way that left me constantly trying to understand “why?”. When someone has such a strong premise, with an original idea like this, it left me annoyed that I never got to know enough about the world and the characters because the pacing was off. One page our protagonist was thoroughly trusting someone, and then, with no rhyme or reason that I could deduce, they no longer trusted this person. I wanted more to this book, more backstory, more world building and definitely more of the characters so we can understand their reasoning. This then allows any plot twists to actually be twists and not just another jolt on the rollercoaster.

I’d be keen to see more of this world and this authors writings, but I really do want more of the actual book and the characters, when it has such a strong and original premise. I saw someone else review this after I had finished writing, and they summarised it far better than me “the executions doesn’t quite match the ambition”. I really do think that sums it up, it needs to be executed better and this book/series would soar