Reviews tagging 'Trafficking'

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

15 reviews

peachani's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I only wish that the
comeuppance
deaths were more gory and protracted. It's what they deserved... Hmm. Maybe I relate to
Moremi
more than I initially thought. 
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falenkizzy's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

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roytoo's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

"The truth claws its way into Nelah’s life from the grave."
That line from the book description echoes my reactions: 
This story clawed into me with its vivid descriptions of mundane, good, bad and evil deeds set in a future Botswana (and world) where very long lives are possible.
But what is the true cigar if those long lives, especially for everyone who isn't a cis male?
Please see the content warnings.
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careinthelibrary's review

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adventurous challenging dark slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes

3.5

The last third was hard to follow but I was reading on a plane so I'm pretty sure that's the cause. Such cool worldbuilding and complex characters. Really compelling and interesting plot. 
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elmmegan's review

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challenging dark emotional fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

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2treads's review against another edition

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challenging dark fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Tsamaase has something here with this futurisric, dystopic-touched novel. But what fatigued me with this one was the bloated plot tgat tackled too many societal themes without giving me the satisfactionof querying and exploring them fully to be affected. Throuh what feels like diary entries more than intercations and converstaions we are shown a society that has essentially imprisoned women in surveillance-heavy relationships or just by existing. 


The onus of violece and criminal behaviour has solely been placed at their feet and they have to undergo invasive mind sweeps every day as well as being profiled after a certain period to ascertain their level of commiting a criminal act. Here we are looking at body autonomy, violence, intimate partner surveillance, patriarcyy, state surveillance and overreach; all in the name of protecting the women and by extension their families. 


Along the way we drip into sexual abuse, trafficking, sexual exploitation, forced sex work through mind control, brief mention of ancestral beliefs, rape, reproductive shaming, economic and political corruption all wrapping their tentacles around this plot, this strangling my enjoyment.


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jaz_gets_literary's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

This book was a wild ride and I absolutely enjoyed every single bit of it. It covers so many topics so please check the trigger warnings before starting. The narration was so good. Some audiobooks you can listen to while you do other things, this is not one of them. While I did listen to this while at the gym and while working, my job is very repetitive. If you have to fully focus on something else while you’re listening to this audiobook, I don’t think you’ll get the best experience. It’s a lot of information and you have to pay attention or you will be confused. I saw that this was classified as horror and I didn’t see it until I realized that what is happening in this book is not that far removed from reality and that’s scary. I love already ordered the physical so that I can annotate it. There were so many moments in this book that I know that I’ll want to look back on. 
Thank you so much to NetGalley for the advanced audiobook of this book. All thoughts and opinions are mine.
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deereadstoo's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Thank you Kensington Books and Erewhon Books for sending me an ARC of this book to review!

"If you hate these toxic roles you're forced into so much, then change it."

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase was a tumultuous journey beyond epic proportions. It began like the slow crawl up a steep, nearly vertical, rollercoaster track. It's not too crazy and doesn't garner much fear. It's almost relaxing. A gentle caress that lulls you to sleep. However, when the car creeps to the top, everything changes. Your heart starts racing, your palms begin to sweat, and your stomach plummets to the floor. You start to wonder why anyone would think this is fun. Then you drop. All the chaos begins to build to a crescendo. That's what this book is. A build-up to a crescendo.

This book was quite boring in the beginning if I'm honest. It was also quite clunky and confusing in its world-building as the author was trying to explain a system/government that would've benefitted greatly from either footnotes or a glossary. I was constantly at a loss trying to understand the body-hopping system, the microchips, how that information and practice is used to keep the society they live in crime-free, etc. It was overwhelming so for the first 30% I was going off of vibes. However, after 30%, the drop happened and we were going full throttle into catastrophe.

Now, this is where the story sends me for a loop and it truly is vibes but make it sci-fi meets body horror meets women's fiction? I felt like there was some inspiration from Beloved by Toni Morrison and Cabin in the Woods (movie). There were so many moving parts in the last 70% that had my head on a swivel. Once we put pedal-to-the-medal, I feel like the overarching message of 'women are at the brunt of a patriarchal society' got lost at points. I could see how the author tried to bring it all together at the end but it felt as though it was plopped into the plot again last minute to re-establish the main point. I think that might've been my biggest disappointment with this book. I hate to say it but I felt like either the patriarchal plot device could've been left out entirely or we could've removed the murder-mystery plot. Even with the clear outline from the synopsis, I don't think the execution of both together was done particularly well. I had a fun time though and that's my overall opinion on rollercoasters.
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readwithtre's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark hopeful reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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thecriticalreader's review against another edition

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dark slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
 
Context: 
I saw Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase on an anticipated releases list and thought it looked/sounded amazing, so I borrowed it from my library through the Libby App.
 
Review:
Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase is the worst book I’ve ever read. There is a reason it has such a low aggregate rating on StoryGraph. It combines the worst elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror, thriller, and feminist rage literature with shitty writing. It’s a shame, too, because the cover art is amazing, and the description sounds sooo interesting. Before I start ranting about what I hated about it, I’m going to start with two positives:

·      First off, there are some kernels of good ideas in here, somewhere amidst the trash.

·      Secondly, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, this book isn’t bad. There are occasionally some sentences that are powerful and poetic. Unfortunately, you have to slog through pages of crap to get to them and when you do, they’re rendered meaningless by their context.
 
Now, for the bad. I don’t normally do reviews in bullet points, but I need some sort of organizational method to contain the rage I feel toward this book.

·      The worldbuilding is overexplained, yet somehow makes NO sense. First of all, nothing that happens is remotely within the realm of scientific possibility. I would be fine with this if it weren’t executed so poorly. I venture to say that 1/4 of this book is exposition explaining the byzantine body-swapping process; it reads like a worldbuilding Google Doc rather than a novel. Tsamaase throws rule after rule at the reader and does so in the most inorganic way possible. For example, characters will stop and explain how their world works to each other with no good reason to do so. Despite the mountains of explanation heaped upon the reader, there are plot holes so big that you could drive a truck through them. 

·      Furthermore, the underlying foundation of the world makes no sense from a sociological perspective. The sort of technology described in this book would radically alter the human experience and society, yet Tsamaase demonstrates zero creativity in imagining these changes. Do you really expect me to believe that people are semi-immortal and can swap bodies, and this doesn’t meaningfully alter society in any way? This alone pretty much ruined the book for me.

·      The characters are flimsy props for the plot, and they contradict themselves constantly. One character will say or believe one thing for the sake of one scene, but as soon as the author wants them to do something for the plot, they will do a 180 at the drop of a hat. 

·      The main character is a despicable, pathetic person whose motivations and actions make no sense. Like the other characters, she constantly contradicts herself.
She spends the first 20% of the book or so explaining how her every move and thought is monitored by her husband, and that if she wants to stay alive and have a child, she needs to be on her best behavior. As soon as she’s done explaining this, she promptly cheats on her husband and does a boatload of drugs. At another point in the book. she tells another character that her husband is a manipulative, abusive psychopath. She then acts shocked (imagine the shocked Pikachu face) when her husband later acts like a manipulative, abusive psychopath! These examples are just the tip of the iceberg with this character.


·      None of the dialogue resembles how real people talk; characters speak in paragraphs. The dialogue is basically a tool for the author to infodump more worldbuilding lore, plot nonsense, and bland feminist outrage at the reader.

·      This book tries so hard to be transgressive, edgy, and violent that it unintentionally has the opposite effect. The plot is fucked up, but that’s not a compliment.

·      The book has no narrative momentum in the first half, and then it suddenly enters turbo mode. The plot is off-the-rails bonkers, and yet it somehow manages to be predictable. Tsamaase piles on clunky plot twist after clunky plot twist, and Womb City quickly starts to feel like ten seasons of a bad supernatural soap opera crammed into one book.

·      The author has no understanding of how human bodies work and adds gore for the sake of gore. Let’s just leave it at that.

·      In xer acknowledgments, Tsmaase says that that xer manuscript was rejected over 400 times. Xe claims it’s because of “gatekeeping,” implies that racial bias was involved, and complains that nobody appreciated the book’s “nuances” until it found the right people. Yeah, I’m gonna call BS on that. I know full well that racial bias and sexism are rampant in the publishing industry, but sometimes people rightfully reject manuscripts because they’re garbage. Womb City is a steaming pile of garbage wrapped in an alluring, shiny bow. 
 
IN SHORT, DON’T BE FOOLED BY THE COOL PREMISE AND THE AMAZING COVER!!! DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME WITH THIS BOOK!!!!
 
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