Review by Booklist Review
Anima (who uses æ/ær pronouns) takes over the minds and bodies of creatures around the city of Ora in order to help preserve order and maintain life. But even as Anima fights to use the Gleaming to forge change, to catch convicts, to prevent suicide, æ begins to feel lost, adrift. Then Vessel arrives, a spirit who will be returned to life once enough stories are collected, enough tales of other people's lives captured in small objects. Lu has built a complex and fascinating world, futuristic and strange. Anima is slowly exposed to new moral dilemmas and experiences through the tales shared, and æ begins to question ær purpose, question whether æ is right to feel true pride and satisfaction in the work æ does, and whether ær city is actually succeeding in caring for its population. This is a strange, subversive, Asian-inspired novella that uses multiple queer pronouns and depicts several queer experiences within its pages, while using stories within stories to layer up to a hopeful climax that urges readers to live and explore.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lu's full-length debut (after the collection Inhalations) combines beautiful prose, a complex structure, and well-wrought Asian-influenced worldbuilding into a powerful, futurist work. Anima, who uses the pronouns æ/ær, is a "node" in the city-state of Ora, tasked with protecting--and surveilling--the citizens using ær connection to the Gleaming, a dreamlike consciousness that flows through all beings, though few can access it directly. The Gleaming enables Anima to body hop into animal forms to patrol the city and serves as an archive of experiences in Ora. When a peculiar visitor named Vessel arrives in Ora to exhibit a collection of objects, the novel breaks off into a plurality of tales as Vessel tells Anima the history attached to each item, among them a marionette, a bundle of letters, and a fish scale. With each story, Anima's narrow understanding of the world further expands, making ær question ær role in Ora. Anima's own life story, when it comes, is conveyed in experimental verse format, setting it apart from the other chapters. A subplot about suicide may trigger sensitive readers, but the matter is well handled and Lu provides a content warning at the start of the novel. This masterful work positions Lu among the vanguard of contemporary futurism and speculative fiction. (Aug.)
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