#sffbookclub

Overall, I love this novel's ideas but the genres it mixes together work against each other rather than being stronger for the combination.

(also please name your protagonist, it's so awkward, thank you)

I found the writing here to be surprisingly funny and engaging. The dialogue between the protagonist and Graham continually made me laugh, and the book is peppered with delightful drive-by analogies like "he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font" or "I lay in my own body like a wretched sandbank".

The strongest part of the book to me (and the part that I found the most engaging) was the relationship and dialogue between the protagonist and Graham. A 19th century sailor is a great foil for modern London life; however, it also does a good job of making both the protagonist and Graham real, fallible characters who each make incorrect assumptions about the other. One other way this relationship also works for me is that it lets the book delve into the parallels of being an expat forced into a new time versus a new place work really well, or of not being be able to go "back".

However, the construction seams of this novel show, and that's where it gets weak. The more "serious" time travel and time war shenanigans feel tacked on, and thematically don't really integrate with the rest of the story (tonally or thematically). As a time travel story, it's not doing anything particularly novel here, and these bits weaken the rest of the novel.

(This was the #SFFBookClub book for May 2025.)

This book was a potential book for the #SFFBookClub poll for a while, but I ended up reading anyway because it looked intriguing.

As a reader, it seems like a novella is a hard length to hit; it's hard to have the space for both pacing and sufficient worldbuilding, and it's also hard to have enough runway for the resolution to resonate and feel satisfying. The short of it is that I feel like this novella nailed it for me.

The worldbuilding here is brutal. The book kicks off with idyllic introduction of Raquel working for the Global Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Pocket Worlds. Pocket worlds are small offshoots of reality, much smaller than our own universe--maybe the size of a meadow or a room or a bag even--and they can run at different time rates to our own universe.

After the protagonist Raquel falls into a fast time pocket world and comes back forty years later (while only a few moments have passed relatively for herself), the world has changed for the worst. Her institute is no longer doing scientific studies, her daughter has died, and capitalism has moved in to colonize the new spaces of these pocket worlds. The implications for labor when corporations have access to nearly infinite time and space goes exactly where you think it might; people signing up for a decade of work to then come back before breakfast, extra dumping grounds for garbage, or even locking rioters into these worlds. These are just a couple examples, but woof this book captures the capitalist extraction of time and space from a new technology.

Raquel is an archeologist of pocket worlds, and believes the Quisqueyan Taino people might have escaped into a pocket world to avoid genocide and is looking for clues to their past. She is the descendant of the Taino but also of conquistadors, and in some ways is at the intersection of both. What really works for me in this book is how her personal history and struggle parallels the larger story about colonialism and capitalism--she has her own insatiable wants for knowledge and family, especially around grief about her archeological work and her lost daughter.

This book is off the #SFFBookClub backlog, and I saw it mentioned on Imperfect Speculation (a blog about disability in speculative fiction).

The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic near future world where most people have lost the ability to dream, and the only "cure" is through the exploitation of bone marrow from indigenous people who still can. The book follows Frenchie, a Métis boy who has lost everybody he cares about and travels with a found family trying to find safety and community. The metaphor here resonates directly with the horrors of Canada past, as armed "recruiters" capture anybody who looks indigenous to send them off to "schools" to extract their bone marrow.

I know this is a YA novel, but I wish some of the characters and the protagonist Frenchie had more depth. Maybe this would land better for somebody else, but I also don't have any room in my heart for jealousy subplots, and the one here did not create any extra characterization that could have made it interesting.

Even if some of the plot points felt a bit weak and unearned, the book still ended in a very emotionally resonant way that worked for me.