Elysium

I'm not sure about rating this at all. 3 or 3.5ish stars? This book was definitely something different.

I loved this book. Desperately sad for the most part but beautifully written and constantly kept me wanting to learn and understand more. It is dizzying and confusing throughout but the reveal at the end makes it all clear and well worth the journey.
Quite a short book so stick with it even if you can't work out what's going on!

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.