Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Books for providing the ARC.

This book is a combination of Altered Carbon's mind digitization / body exchange world and Minority Report's preemptive crime prevention theme, but it is much more. For my taste, we switch genres too many times (we start with basic sci-fi, which turns into ghostly horror, and then we turn back to some supernatural dystopia), and the topics touched are not covered either, rather they are told to the reader. Characters talk unnaturally directly about the world's sexism and racism, for example. It's also hard to get attached to the characters, the two main men in Nelah's life, her husband and her lover, are all written in such a way that any sane person would get to know them with a high-speed reader, which is fine, but because of this, it's hard for me to feel any sympathy for Nelah's first 20% towards her situation where she laments between the two men. And this is just one of the points that I understand why the author uses the way xe does, but they caused a negative effect on me (Nelah's brother and Moremi's character is comically evil sometimes, for example).

I hope the book finds its readers, I liked its world building, but overall I didn't enjoy it.

The premise of this is so incredibly interesting and I loved the conversations that were being discussed within this. Unfortunately, the pacing and writing were two factors that I struggled with the most. It didn't feel as if there was much that was left unsaid. Everything seems to laid out very plainly and held the reader's hand. It was interesting and held my interest very quickly, there were just so many times that I genuinely felt pulled out of the story due to these issues.

This book was part bleak, part realistic and part total fiction, and all parts a worthy read. I think anyone who enjoys things like Black Mirror or Cyberpunk will find this an enthralling read. My only issue was the slight pacing issues near the middle of the book, but the rest was wonderful.

I received this copy of Womb City, for an honest review, from NetGalley and Kensington Books, Erewhon Books.

There are just so many things about this book that, on paper, sound amazing. The themes, the commentary, the genre - all of that add up to what I thought was going to be an impactful, powerful, and highly engaging read. This book only takes place in a couple days! We’re constantly reminded of the timeline at the start of each chapter. I was fully prepared to brag about this book to everyone. However, there are a couple things that just fell flat for me and, ultimately, didn’t make this the perfect book for me.

The book started out pretty great. The idea of body hopping, surveillance, and commentary on misogyny rang strong. Feeling trapped and isolated in your own body and not having fully autonomy are themes that are, I’m sure, will be important in the future, but are also very relevant now. The cool thing about science fiction books is that, while they are set in the future (oftentimes), they are commenting and reflecting issues of the current day.

When I thought I had things figured out and knew the projection of the story, the author took a completely different turn. It led to an unpredictability that is sometimes hard to find. However, it also led to issues I had. It seemed that once we got our bearings of our environment and an understanding of what is going on, we had more thrown at us and more suspension of reality was required. This happened several times. More than several times. It happened enough times, complete shift in focus, storyline, and belief, that it was whiplash for me.

I appreciated the commentary, as mentioned before, but the constant shifting slowly wore me down to the point of not caring about any of the characters or about the world. (Which is sad, as the future of this world is dependent on what happens in this story.) I can see how some people rated this very high, but I can also see how some people rated this low. Before I read this book, I looked at the reviews, and it seemed like people either really loved it or people were aggressively against it.

I do find myself in the middle only because the beginning had so much promise. I think if the book was divided into parts, it would have been “easier” to change drastically along with the book. This book just isn’t for me, but I’m not shitting on it for others. I can see how folks would really enjoy the constant changing, shifting, and inability to guess at what is going to happen next. I enjoyed the science fiction, horror, and cultural merge Tsamaase used and can see folks really clinging on to this.

By the end, I was ready to be done.

I was unable to finish this book . Though I thought the premise of the story was amazing ,when I read it I found it to be a lot of world building and trying to understand what was going on and that just never rounded out for me. I think I will buy this book and retry gain later but as of now it wasn’t easy for me to continue .

In what's probably going to be my most brutal review of a book this year, Womb City was a pure disappointment.

This book is reminiscent of Altered Carbon (in a good way), Minority Report (in a good way), and The Hunger Games (in a bad, confusing way). The main character lives in a "utopia" where people immortal - their consciousnesses are guaranteed 200 (or is it 700? The author seems unsure across the narrative) years of life across multiple bodies but transferring across bodies causes memory loss (for the main character but seemingly not for her husband or her lover). The main character is under extreme surveillance from a computer chip implanted in her neck because the last host of her body committed a crime - except for when the woman she murdered (her ghost? Her spirit? Her physical body?) starts to hunt her and her loved ones down for revenge. Then it turns out this is orchestrated by the hyper (but secretly) religious government to appease one (of many?) god(s) in The Murder Trials. Then the main character becomes the god and... the plot ends. Add on to this the main character's overly-numerous feminist rants (appreciated but definitely forced into the narrative too many times in the first third of the book - maybe several times per chapter?) and the extreme passiveness and helplessness of the main character, almost nothing about this book was an enjoyable read.

I was hoping for a lot more out of this book; I'm looking forward to seeing if the author will continue to improve their writing and release more books because the premise felt so revolutionary that I want to see more.

- thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an arc to review!


- a thrilling dystopian novel with a strong protagonist, high stakes, and a strong voice. i wish i could've enjoyed this way more, but for what it was, it was enjoyable and thrilling.

DNF @36%

At first, I liked the concept. But I don't like the main character or where her storyline is at anymore.

I'm sorry to say I absolutely did not connect with this book whatsoever.

The description was intriguing and I liked the cover but I struggled almost immediately when I started reading it and it did not get better.

While I found the world building and concept intriguing the whole book left me cold. I thought the writing was terrible and a lot of direct "telling" not showing as if the writer didn't trust the audience to pick up on things.

TW: murder, abuse, torture, miscarriages

This is an amazing work of Afro-futurism. In future Botswana where an old body can be cast aside for a new one, when youth can be forsaken for wealth and memories stored in a database, Nelah is struggling through a trouble marriage, strained family dynamics and impaired fertility when she and her lover are involved in a hit and run. Things take a dramatic turn and everything we know and think about our bodies and identities is questioned. This read left me stunned and genuinely surprised- which is hard to do considering our current reality is stranger than fiction.

I felt very disappointed because I was so excited to read this book. However, it’s been hugely let down by what I believe to be a massive failure on the part of the editing team that’s made it almost completely unreadable. The premise is ingenious: with consciousness-transplanting technology, people are able to live multiple lifetimes by switching bodies, meaning that possessing a body is a commodity. People inhabiting bodies that have previously committed crimes are microchipped, like our protagonist Nelah. The interplay of family, identity, consciousness, and relationships within this societal framework is fascinating.
The problems I have with this book are primarily writing problems that were never fixed in the editing process. Horribly incorrect sentence structure and punctuation lead to lack of clarity in plot points. Informational dumping lasts for pages and is strangely placed in the middle of people’s conversations. The worldbuilding is extremely interesting but very clunky in its delivery. The main character continually rehashed plot points in her mind and how they made her feel, which became unbelievably repetitive. I think this book would have been a lot more effective if the worldbuilding and relationships were delivered more along the lines of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go,” where the reader is sort of forced to guess at why and how societal structures came to be, instead of being force-fed clumsy exposition. Again I think this could have been an absolutely incredible novel with some sentence-level edits and trimming, so it’s very disappointing to see such a promising novel under-deliver.

I really wanted to love this - an extreme dystopian surveillance state where, on the surface, crime is all but eliminated as people hop from body to body to escape preventable death, but in reality sexism is rampant and the bodies of former criminals are viciously and strictly monitored even though they have new occupants.

However, the writing style just ain’t it. Loooong paragraphs of winding, semi-contradicting sentences, big infodump passages that don’t entirely make sense (how do you know how many lifespans and body hop seasons you’ve had? 70 years? 200 hundred years? I literally had no idea how that was supposed to work) and then there’d be whole chapters lauding this crazy system as a utopia and then our narrator would go on at length about the corruption, racism, sexism, and classism inherent to the system. The chapters have assigned dates and times but they don’t seem to be followed at all? There were several flashbacks or flash forwards that came out of left field and left me even more confused.

I legitimately couldn’t follow the story

The ideas explored in this story are amazing, but I’m not invested in any of the characters. I don’t need a likeable character, but the main character came across as whiny, and everyone around her felt like a caricature. I just couldn’t care less about the story.

My desire for strong character work overwhelms the intriguing plot. While I think Womb City has intriguing and necessary themes to talk about, the execution leaves much to be desired.

My first read by this author and I was mind blown! There's so many big twists and plot points that the story constantly balances on the edge of becoming ridiculous, but by the seer talent of the author and by xer writing skills I'm willing to believe everything she tells me. I had my jaw to the floor the entire read. Anything you could imagine being in this type of dystopian futuristic book is probably in this. READ THIS BOOK! #netgalley #wombcity

Amazing. I can't stop thinking about this book. Seeing the way society had progressed to considering the body as something that is exchangeable. It really shook me seeing how the body was treated as something that wasn't an intimate and irreplaceable aspect of themselves but was instead something that could be traded and altered to suit the needs and wants of others. Seeing how, especially for women, that their value is not in their own actions or who they are as a person, but the value of the body they have. It was a horror story before it even started getting to the really juicy bits and I loved it. 10 out of 10 would recommend.

I really wanted to like this one. An ambitious and intelligent project, I was intrigued by the concept and design of this dystopian future. However, I felt lost in the dense writing and disconnected from both the plot and Nelah after an initially strong start.

DNF @ 22%

Thank you NetGalley and Kensington Books for the advanced reader copy.

A unique, intelligent, interesting read. I really enjoined the concept and thought it was very timely. Would for sure recommend to those who like the genre!

DNF @ 12.3%
I really wanted to fall in love with this but the lack of character work is making that impossible. It's extra sad because this is sci-fi by an african author and we get so few of those. I love me a preachy book but this lacked the characters to carry the story for me and make me care about the plot.

I received a copy of this from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I originally requested this as the synopsis reminded me a bit of Altered Carbon, with the fact that consciousnesses can body jump. That is where the similarities seemed to end. Rather than pushing the plot forward, the first 40% or so of the book felt like one massive info dump. It felt a bit repetitive, with the same things being mentioned over and over. For example, I understood that Nelah's main goal was to have a child pretty much from page 1, however, that seemed to be her sole focus. We only get narrative from her, and she isn't really that interesting outside of being in a borrowed body.

The really interesting ideas there explored, like body jumping, memory wipes and how Nelah is subjected to violations of her memories, but rather than really digging deep, they were only ever mentioned on the surface level.

There was a fairly good twist that came near the end, and the pacing did pickup about halfway through, but it did feel a bit late. If I wasn't' reading this for a review, I most likely would have DNF'd before things actually became interesting.