Womb City
2024 • 416 pages
Ratings5
Average rating2.5
15
Ratings5
Average rating2.5
WOMB CITY imagines a dark and deadly future Botswana, rich with culture and true folklore, which begs the question: how far must one go to destroy the structures of inequality upon which a society was founded? How far must a mother go to save the life of her child?
Nelah seems to have it all: wealth, fame, a husband, and a child on the way. But in a body her husband controls via microchip and the tailspin of a loveless marriage, her hopes and dreams come to a devastating halt. A drug-fueled night of celebration ends in a hit-and-run. To dodge a sentencing in a society that favors men, Nelah and her side-piece, Janith Koshal, finish the victim off and bury the body.
But the secret claws its way into Nelah's life from the grave. As her victim's vengeful ghost begins exacting a bloody revenge on everyone Nelah holds dear, she'll have to unravel her society's terrible secrets to stop those in power, and become a monster unlike any other to quench the ghost's violent thirst.
Reviews with the most likes.
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.
The concept of this book was super interesting to me; a world where people can body hop and live hundreds of years while simultaneously, everything women do is controlled, even down to pregnancy. But unfortunately, I think most of it went right over my head. Things were a lot deeper than they originally seemed and it just confused me every time new information was given to the reader. I did enjoy the social conversations this book had throughout about wealth, race, sex vs. gender, and the overall struggles of being a woman, and I think that's what saved this book for me. I was super excited about this novel and I'm only slightly disappointed that I didn't love it.
Thank you to Kensington Books, Erewhon Books, and Recorded Books for providing me with both an eBook and an Audiobook copy to review on NetGalley.
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.
