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.

African science fiction is somehow always connected with ancestral myths and traditions, but without trespassing into fantasy. This is also well understood in Womb City, which is particularly focused on the female condition. In a society that has 'mechanised' reincarnation and devised a method to keep the population's criminal impulses under control, the protagonist, reincarnated for the third time in a 'criminal body' and then microchipped for control, discovers how precarious her situation is and how those she considers the cornerstones of her life do nothing but betray her - and all women - to maintain a status quo based on a culture of manipulation and rape.
Although the premise is very interesting, one gets the impression that the author has put too all at once and that at some points she has resorted to continuity solutions and non-sequiturs to carry the narrative forward. Moreover, apart from the protagonist, the characters are a little too two-dimensional.

The concept is intriguing, and the world-building ideas are solid. Unfortunately, I found the characters unlikable, and the writing style dense and unexciting. As a result, the book tired me. I attempted to take a break and approach it with a fresh perspective, but unfortunately, I still encountered the same issues. Ultimately, I decided to mark it as Did Not Finish (DNF) at the 48% mark.

I went into this book with good expectations, but I quickly learned that the writing style was not for me. Instead of pushing through only to give this a negative rating, I decided to DNF this one.

While the pacing starts off somewhat slow and the reader is handed a lot of information to keep track of, from backstory to plot to world, then the latter half of the book ties together everything amazingly. It's worth powering through, in my opinion, if you don't mind rereading a couple of paragraphs at times to make absolutely sure that you're on board with wherever the story has gone and is currently going. The finale is glorious if you do. This is perhaps partly due to the unapologetic emotional resonance of the book that never seems to falter. And the lyrical, decadent prose also deserves an honorable mention here. If you're dubious, keep going. It's very likely that you'll be very happy if you do (for me, this is a pattern with a lot of Erewhon books that I've learned to trust by now).

I'm wondering if this book just got lost in translation? It seems as if it was written by someone who is still learning English. The writing and plot are quite good. I recommend this.