Elysium

Kind of disappointing. The gimmick is obvious from the computer error messages and the first green dot. Kind of hard to get invested in the characters when they're all just placeholders.

Listening to this book rather than reading it myself was a great choice on this one. The narrator of the book is fabulous. She brought the story to life and gave each character a voice that I easily identified. This is a five star audio production.

The writing is well crafted. I would describe the plot as being intricately woven by a master hand. I found myself caught up in the mystery, wanting to see how all the pieces fit together. As the story moves along, I saw bits and pieces and I found the timing of the reveal to be right on the verge of my understanding and it sheds light on the whole story.

There is a deep dive showing the nature of a multitude of relationships between people. How we feel about each other and navigate these relationships. It's not always pretty and it isn't always honorable.

This story has a trigger for me with graphic sex. I believe it is mainly in one place in the book, may have one other scene that pops up. It's not that I avoid books with sex scenes, I just don't enjoy eavesdropping on that level of detail. I almost didn't continue when after the graphic sex. Had it come up another time, I likely would have walked away. That was a powerful scene that was written so well that it created a lasting image in my mind. Sex by nature does have such emotion to lend power to these images. Had this been a non sexual scene, it would have still been powerful, but would likely not have stayed with the reader like a sexual one does. I salute Brissett for masterful writing, although it was a scene that I felt was not for me to see, if you will.

Overall, this is a mind-bending tale that kept me engaged all the way through. I found myself thinking about the book for awhile afterward, thinking through a number of implications. I really like that this book made me think. I would recommend this book to people who enjoy a good sci-fi dystopian story who has no qualms with a graphic sex scene. The weight of the graphic sex influences my rating in this case, for right or wrong.

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

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.

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!

Not my cup of tea.