This one hurts, but if you're a nihilist / cynic / pessimist who's trying to work on all that... this might give you pause about how you treat other people, and how you interact with the world, and how you wish things would go back to the way they were. Near-future sci-fi mindfulness. ( )

"Anarchy Can be so cozy if you bring enough pillows" Tetley the only sane Garbagetowner

In the spirit of this book; WHAT in the actual F$vK! It's not often a book does an absolute mindscramble like breakfast eggs on me without horror tropes filled with blood and gore. This one has been so damned and so unsettling and different, truly horrifying. I just want to do a mindmelt with the author so I can get an understanding of what in the everloving f$vk is going on up in there.

I devoured this book much like the Thames came up and swallowed Londontown whole and left eels behind. It was a glorious read.

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Review Breakdown: deserves a 10/5


General Plot: 5 no matter how absurd the cities sound, Pill hill, Electric City, Garbagetown, the fact that this is a very real possibility even if it is probably 100 years away is terrifying.

Characters: 3 Everyone is so very bloody haunting.

Style/Grammar: 1 F&$*ng unique. This is prose like no other.

Overall Flow: 2

Quotes: A fat seagull eyed me from the top of a cliff of shredded vinyl and hood ornaments. Dead psychosis spun up in his dead eyes. I don't mean to say he was a bad bird. All seagulls are dead-eyed psychos. If the whole fuckwit culture was a bird, it would be a seagull. Ravenous, stupid, vicious, not a single shit given, nice feathers.

Memorable Scene: Tetley negotiating updating a user profile with what sounds suspiciously like a talking vibrator (or a lamp? It's murky at best) powered by TENG and Samsung - all while a psycho seagull hovers about shooting death stares at her.

StoryGraph Challenge: 1800 books by 2025
Challenge Prompt: 150 Speculative Fiction Books ( )

The post-apocalyptic setting and many references to Shakespeare bring Station Eleven to mind, but this book is too in love with its own cleverness to provide the emotional depth of that novel. The many fanciful names for neighborhoods in Garbagetown are occasionally amusing, but if it's supposed to be satire that so many items are both still preserved and functional 100 years into the collapse of industrial society, it's not clear. Too much of the story is mushy and reliant on "tone" for me to really appreciate it, though I am very much in agreement that climate change is an existential threat that we should be doing more to avoid and/or mitigate. And settling Mars is not the answer! ( )

What an utterly bizarre book!
At times the writing was poignant and other times nonsensical and hard to read as the English the characters used in this book had its own vernacular that was hard to get my head around.
The overall tone of the book is quite bleak and yet I wanted to know how it ended. Not quite sure how I feel about it all but definitely unlike anything else I have read. ( )

HOW TO EVEN TALK ABOUT THIS BOOK?

It takes place on a floating garbage patch in a post-climate-crisis world where everything is now underwater and the pre-crisis people are reviled as the fuckwits they/we were/are for recklessly destroying everything. All of society/identity is based on what kind of garbage you process to add to the island. And our protagonist has done something so huge/drastic/unpopular that the law is that anyone can do anything they like to her -- curse her, attack her, destroy her things, and she is supposed to thank them "for the instruction."

And yet? Telley is somehow made of hope? And love for all that is left? And the book is about making connections and the power of stories and loving what you have and letting go of what you don't. As is typical of Valente, I got to a certain point and felt whomped by how much I loved this. She is made of magic. ( )