Caro

I tore through this one, it's such a fast read that "one more chapter" turned into way past midnight (even though these are some long chapters). Rishi shows up at Stanford as this burnt out teenage climate activist who just wants to stop saving the world for five minutes and actually live, study literature, fall in love, mess around. Then COVID empties the campus and she ends up on a farm collective with everyone, and the book turns into this messy tangle of politics and desire and people figuring out what they owe each other. The pandemic setting could have felt gimmicky but it gave the whole thing this trapped, pressure cooker feeling that really worked for me.

What got me most was watching Rishi keep making the exact same mistakes, falling into the same patterns and situationships and never quite learning. Normally that drives me up the wall, but here it felt painfully real instead of annoying, very true to being young and a bit lost. My one tiny gripe is the thing with Georgia, because we never find out what that email says since Rishi just deletes it without reading it, and the nosy part of me really wanted to know. But that's probably the point. Four stars, quick, queer, smart, and stuck with me for days.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC

Dystopia is my favorite genre, so I really wanted to love this. A climate dome for billionaires on a Greek island, art as propaganda for the end of the world, mass migration in the background. On paper, that's exactly my kind of book. In practice, it never comes together. The premise is doing all the work while the story drifts from one beautiful sentence to the next without ever committing to anything. The satire of wealth and the art world is sharp in places, but the plot it's attached to stays vague: the "deep currents of violence" we're promised never become anything concrete enough to feel dangerous, and the narrator is so passive that I stopped caring what he discovered. His grief, which should be the emotional core, is told more than felt.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC

I really liked this book. The whole concept of leaving an instance of yourself behind when you cross a border is one of those sci fi ideas that gets under your skin, because it's not really about the tech at all, it's about identity and the lives we don't get to live. I have to admit the beginning was a bit confusing for me though. With the instances sharing names and the switching between Rose and Soyoung I kept getting lost about who was who, and my brain needed a while to settle into it. Once it clicked I was completely in.
What I loved most was all the philosophy and mythology woven through the story. The book keeps asking what actually makes you yourself, whether the version of you that stayed home is less real than the one who left, and it pulls in Korean folklore and these almost mythic ideas about doubles and souls in a way that felt thoughtful instead of decorative. As someone who has lived between places and identities, the immigration metaphor hit hard. It's such a clever way to literalize that feeling of being split in two by a move.
My only real complaint is the ending. After all that slow careful buildup of tension between Rose and her instance, the last stretch felt rushed, like the book suddenly remembered it had to wrap everything up. I wanted more room to breathe in those final chapters. Still, for a debut novel this is seriously impressive and the ideas have stayed with me since I closed it. If you liked Severance or you enjoy sci fi that is more about people than spaceships, definitely pick this one up.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC

Buzzard grabbed me right away. It's 2086, abortion is illegal, corporations track women's fertility, and Mae Bastet, a midwife who helped women who needed care, gets sent to a private prison in the desert run by a paramilitary company called Obsityan. The setup is scary because it doesn't feel far off. The first chunk of the book flew by for me. The most interesting part for me is what comes after the ending. What happens to Mae's sons. What happens to Obsityan. The consequences. That's the book I wanted. Ray finishes in a spot that promises a better story than the one she told. A sequel or even one extra chapter would have changed my whole feeling about it. Good idea, okay execution, but the best version of Buzzard is the one I din't get to read. 

Dead Batteries looks like a post apocalyptic survival story on the surface, but it's really about one mother and her autistic, nonverbal son trying to hold their tiny routine together after a virus wipes out almost everyone. May and Davis live in an abandoned library, and the whole world has narrowed down to scavenging batteries for Davis's old Game Boy. That little lifeline carries so much weight, and Maupin clearly writes it from the inside.

What stayed with me is how honestly the book shows the labor of caring for a kid who can't speak for himself. The mental load, the physical exhaustion, the constant scanning for the next meltdown, none of it ever lets up. As someone neurodivergent myself I found a lot of it painfully familiar, even though Davis's needs are nothing like mine. May carries something that would flatten most people, and the book never turns her into a lesson or a tragedy. She just gets to be tired and scared and fiercely loving.

My one real gripe is that the middle drags. Once Bird turns up with his proposition the pacing slows to a crawl, and that same exhaustion that makes the book powerful starts to feel repetitive on the page. A few things get implied rather than explained too, so I reread some passages and still wasn't sure what happened. The ending won me back though, and it's surprisingly tender. Four stars, and I'll be thinking about May for a while.