Womb City

I'm new to sci-fi genre, I struggled to follow some of the key plot points at times. The world is dense and rich, but also confusing to keep track of. The premise of the book is extremely interesting, it covers important topics such as race, identity, misogyny, classism, and motherhood. This book makes many great points about the reality of womanhood today and what could be. Even though I did enjoy this story something felt flat. I wish it was told in a story I loved more. 

I have mixed feelings about this book; it's definitely a unique story. While it falls into the sci-fi/horror/dystopia genre, which isn't typically my go-to, I found it intriguing nonetheless. Despite feeling confused, half of the time, I was still invested in the story. It also delves into important topics like feminism, patriarchy, race, gender, identity, and motherhood.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARCA in exchange for an honest review.

While I did enjoy the speculative fiction angle, which is all I thought this book would be, there were too many happening for me to enjoy keeping track of. The book starts with interesting description of a not too distant future in Botswana where people can download their conscience into other bodies, and everybody has the right to live several consecutive lives in different bodies, with a caveat - and in this same incredibly progressive society, whoever has the misfortune to have committed a crime of any kind is forevermore shunned and has to undergo an annual investigation into whether they display other criminal tendencies. Women are regularly brutalised and mistreated, and it gets worse from there. I loved the accents which brilliant I giving just the right touch of colour without impeding understanding. Overall, I'd say I'd look forward to another book by this author l'if it leaned more heavily into the speculative fiction aspect.

After taking part in just about every goodreads giveaway possible, I finally got approved for the audio from NetGalley. I love the cover, and I really wanted to dig into this one.

Unfortunately, this may have arrived to me at just the wrong time or something, or perhaps not. It just didn’t grip me, didn’t work.

I sadly found the main character to be incredibly unlikable. So even with her living in and through trauma, there isn’t necessarily enough for me to grab onto to care. For me, adultery just turns me off to pretty much anything you could possibly say, so although it’s about her having control over something, any little thing, it just doesn’t matter to me. It’s wrong. Doesn’t matter if I understand the angle.

With that being said, it left the story feeling like it was really missing something, and in that sense, it read as sadly boring, and even confusing at some points. I think the confusion was meant to be, in part, showing the detachment from the main character, but it didn’t exactly work for me. Which is really sad, because the snippets of background world you get are really interesting. You’re dropped into this sort of Afro-futuristic Botswana where technology has reached all new heights—people can live longer, transfer consciousness into other bodies, and augment themselves—but sadly these heights are still being used to further invade women’s space. And in this case, sadly their literal minds and memories, and nothing is safe.

Thank you Netgalley and Publisher for letting me read this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

*Some spoilers ahead

Felt myself trudging along because the rules of this system felt impossible to grasp. And I felt the book was also struggling with this because the rules were being brought up over and over and over again. The body hopping stuff is just so incredibly lost on me. In general, the book was trying to do so many things until it felt convoluted on purpose. I felt the true essence of the book's purpose in the last 30% of the book. The strength of this book was the vivid imagery and beautiful writing. There were some insanely emotional and violent moments that, if you can stomach them, truly bring the characters and plot to life.

Before the murder trials were exposed later in the book, I was really confused why the main emotional conflict was “I can't believe the men in my life aren't getting punished like me” after the main character brutally murders (literally strangles, all by herself) a random girl. It felt almost comical that that's the argument we were making about being a woman: we both were there when I murdered her, why am I being punished more because I have a vagina? The consequence felt unbalanced to the crime, for sure. But the first half of the book felt like the MC was searching for a scapegoat, someone to blame, until it fell beautifully in her lap. I can't blame her for that and I'm sure she was meant to be written like that. But it was definitely frustrating as it undermined the legitimacy of the feminist lens to me, at least for the first half of the book. The ending definitely flips the script where we see the manipulation and abuse of the murder trials. I just wish we had gotten to this bigger conflict earlier because I was seriously struggling to take serious that we were meant to side with the MC.

I enjoyed the ending. A perfect society, without abuse and discrimination, can only occur when everything is wiped clean. Hard lesson to learn but it was creatively done.