Gorgeously wrought prose poetry – sometimes overcomplicated – that challenges religious assumptions with tragic fury
Ami J. Sanghvi’s ‘Devolution’ is a rare beast; a collection of prose poetry with the fire and bite of 20- and 21st century confessional and political literature, and the linguistic mastery and complexity of the 18th-19th century classics. ‘Devolution’ is an intertextual work – like fanfiction, it engages with a prior text, in this case Dante’s Inferno, and challenges its ideas. ‘Devolution’ does an absolutely beautiful job of this. It pulls out a lot of Inferno’s assumptions, challenges notions about the Christian God himself, and beneath it all is an anger that many of us can understand if not directly share. I also really appreciate that the author of this collection – a direct response to Dante and a criticism of Christianity’s historical doctrines – is a queer, Indian woman.
Tag: reedsy review
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Great ideas and evocative writing but suffers from an overdose of tropes and a love for violence.
We Are Omega is an alien-invasion story built on an almost-too-familiar template, in which Molly McManus and Wells Marsden, two Australian teenagers, find themselves fighting the supposedly-benevolent Xenocrustaceans. The book takes cues from Stargate SG-1, Tomorrow When The War Began and other young-adult science fiction novels.
The good: Molly and Wells are fantastic, fun characters. Molly is an angry goth kid who deliberately fails a test that would give her a chance to work at the Institute because she hates the Xenocrustaceans that much. She swears like a sailor, and doesn’t put up with anybody’s crap – a fun archetype that’s deconstructed when a dare for her to climb a fence goes horribly wrong. Wells is her polar opposite, an anxiety-ridden hacker with a shady past who just wants to figure out what the right thing to do is – and have the courage to go through with it. Their interactions with each other and with the side characters (Mackenzie, Remy, Jesse and others) are the most fun part of this book, especially when one or both of them are panicked or stressed.
Read the rest on Reedsy Discovery!
WE ARE OMEGA is also on Goodreads.
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An intricate, sometimes confusing, fantasy thriller with a touch of eldritch and gorgeous worldbuilding.
‘City of Whispers’ is a complex and sometimes confusing dark-fantasy adventure, following Airene and her Finches as they try to uncover the truth. I deeply enjoyed this book, and more and more the further through the novel I got.
First, the good – the setting of ‘City of Whispers’ is gorgeously developed. With clear inspirations from Ancient Greece (the characters wear chitons, have names like Airene and Lykos, and even the democracy and social structure borrows from Ancient Athens), the city of Oedija feels like a real place, with interclass tensions and a rich history illustrated in snippets from fictional recordings at the beginning of each chapter.
Read the rest on Reedsy Discovery!
City of Whispers is also on Goodreads.
Elliott Dunstan 