Venomous Lumpsucker

I enjoyed this book. It had a great sense of humour, wit and regularly made me laugh. Unfortunately, I feel like it was a 100 page short story fleshed out with so many insignificant details that really took away from the ending. In fact I believe my comment was something in the realm of “All that for that ending”. Such a shame to have to give such a low rating on a book I actually enjoyed.

A story that is sort-of off-stage comical, which touches on serious topics of species extinction, habitat destruction, global warming, and so on. The positive: it takes the capitalist “credits” scheme and shows how it can be abused producing simply opposite results to the goal (A good antidote to Kim Stanley Robinson's naïveté on this topic.) I'm convinced Beauman is a realist, alas. Negative: it ends up with a rather tired trope (which I will refrain from elaborating on - for spoiler reasons) and 2 cliffhanger endings, which felt rather weak at the end.

This is the most delightful book about mass species extinction that you'll ever read. Ned Beauman employs pitch-perfect gallows humor to engage with human-caused environmental destruction in a fresh and exciting way.

I was quite charmed by Beauman's madcap storytelling and clever writing and I lost count of the number of times I highlighted an amusing passage or chuckled to myself whilst reading this book. It's very, very funny.

The highest praise I can give a book is that it has “readability” and Venomous Lumpsucker has this in spades – fast paced, an engaging story, smart humor, and interesting characters. This book is a winner.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.