betty@bookwyrm.social reviewed Metal from Heaven by August Clarke
Like if Roger Zelazny was Samuel R Delaney
4 stars
This book is aggressively, in your face queer in a way that is hard to come by. Reading it was mildly hallucinatory, partly because the protagonist has a disability that causes her to hallucinate, and the prose echoes this, becoming disjointed when she is experiencing this. (The book is extremely written, and the prose required a little bit of alertness from me.)
This book is about a child whose world is detroyed by capitalism when her family and loved ones are gunned down at the factory they are striking at. She survives this to become a train robber, and when she grows up, the only way to give the people who took her in and gave her a new life a chance at survival is going undercover in a society of rich capital class lesbians, all of whom have been trained from birth to viciously claw their way to the …
This book is aggressively, in your face queer in a way that is hard to come by. Reading it was mildly hallucinatory, partly because the protagonist has a disability that causes her to hallucinate, and the prose echoes this, becoming disjointed when she is experiencing this. (The book is extremely written, and the prose required a little bit of alertness from me.)
This book is about a child whose world is detroyed by capitalism when her family and loved ones are gunned down at the factory they are striking at. She survives this to become a train robber, and when she grows up, the only way to give the people who took her in and gave her a new life a chance at survival is going undercover in a society of rich capital class lesbians, all of whom have been trained from birth to viciously claw their way to the top.
And everyone agrees she's not really the ideal person for the job, but that person's dead, and so maybe her ability to smooth talk her way into a lady's pants and/or skirt will help?
She does her best, but she is never going to make a good decision when faced with a hot girl, and things are so much bigger than her, and as a warning, if you're hoping for an ending where they enemy is defeated and the hero and her sweetheart ride off into the sunset, this is not... that. (The book's cover expresses that it is for "fans of Princess Bride and Gideon the Ninth." I do not think this accurately conveys much about the book except swords and lesbians!)
I enjoyed this book immensely, partly for its own sake, and partly for giving me something I have not found elsewhere.