This didn't really feel like a story, more like someone explaining their gender, with a few random bits about a space prince thrown in, but even he didn't do much. A lot was figurative or explanatory or emotions, not a lot was actually happening in the moment. So there was gender exploration, which is great! But not much else. And I don't understand how the prince was connected to the main character. I'm not even sure if he was just figurative or not. I guess, overall, I didn't get it. A little too nebulous for me. But if you like that sorta thing, and you also like nonbinary rep, trans guy rep, and sentient spaceships, maybe you'll like this more.

Pluralities follows two perspectives - someone on a journey of understanding their gender while connecting with a new trans friend and a rogue prince traveling through space with his sentient spaceship.

This book is so beautifully written. It explores the difficult and confusing process of understanding one's gender identity and the trans experience. There is so much space for queer joy in this book, which I was really grateful for. What an incredible queer journey it took me on. I really appreciated this story.

A really nice look at identity and belonging. One half of a story is more relatable, set in a world similar to our own with light speculative elements, the other is more overtly SFF and feels dreamy in a way. Normaly, I would latch on to the stranger world much more, but here the more contemporary one captured me right away, big thanks to the prose and protagonist. If you're looking for more representation, or if you want it explored in more unique ways, I recommend this.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for giving me an e-ARC of this book to review.

This was such a unique and beautiful novella that explores queerness in a way I had never seen before, tackling topics like dysphoria and gender identity together with speculative sci-fi. The author’s writing is breathtaking and I loved how the two stories managed to tie together into one. I can’t wait to get a physical copy of this one!

Thank you to the publishers, author and NetGalley for the free copy of this book.

This was a pretty unique read, and very well written. I would have enjoyed more of either story line! I liked Bo the best though.

This story is a short journey but a good one that you'll continue to think about after reading. Seeing the characters try and find themselves is both relatable and educational. Speculative books have never been my thing but maybe after this I've changed my mind.

3.75 stars

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for this e-ARC.

This was such a delightful novella!
It's a short story told in two pov's (and two who actually never meet but share a similar character development).

One is a rogue prince in space having adventures with his sentient robot friend and the other POV is about a young non-binary person coming to terms with their gender identity (named in the book only as "She").

I have to say that the Rogue prince pov was not my favourite, I can see what Silver was trying to do with the writing style in this pov but it just didnt connect with me and although it was still a sweet story, It was also pretty vague and forgettable.

The pov of our non-binary protagonist however was really amazing. The way "She" came to terms with what they always were was beautiful to see(the difference between wanting and *being*). I felt extremely invested in their pov from the get-go and the ending left me with a big smile on my face.

We definitely dont see enough non-binary protagonists in books!

I was so excited to read this book after receiving it. However I feel a bit flat having finished it. The description and disclosure of the complications of gender and it's multitudes, stereotypes and misunderstanding I found interesting but the switching into science fiction was awkward and world building was weak. It seemed fractured and difficult to read which was a great shame as the topics covered were dealt with sensitively.

This is an interesting speculative sci-fi novella with chapters alternating between character perspectives. I enjoyed following the progression and evolution of each of the characters but found it difficult to go back and forth between the two. I could, however, continue reading more of each narrative on its own.
I found Bo to be the most charming! Overall it was a strange but well-written little book. . Thank you you NetGalley and Atthis Arts for sharing the reading experience!

Thank you to NetGalley/the publisher for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

There is something quite raw and honest and beautiful about this book and the way it explores non-binary gender identity. I struggle to put it all into words without spoilers, but I'll give it a go below. If you've ever questioned your gender or felt like you didn't quite belong though, you should give this a read.

It accepts in a way that I don't think I've ever seen before in media, that the concept is messy and difficult and finding who one is in that universe of possibilities can be so difficult. The link too to the AFAB feeling of being a 'traitor' to women when one simply is not a woman really struck a cord.

The book is beautifully written - the prose is accessible yet magical. It mixes humour, copious (excellent) Stardew Valley references, with dark moments and profound lines, in a way that feels effortless. It manages to be profound in such a fluid, natural way, that you very rarely find in books: I couldn't describe what it felt like to be myself, to be nonbinary, but I could read through the stories and decide whether or not they felt like mine.

And the parallel storylines are both fascinating enough to keep one hooked the entire time. The metaphor of the second story ties in nicely with the first as well.

This was such a unique and beautiful novella, and the exploration of transness and nonbinary genders made me feel so seen. Highly recommend!

This was really interesting! I'm not well versed in speculative sci-fi, but I've been getting more into queer novellas and wanted to give this a try.
I think overall this was successful, but I wasn't sold on one of the perspectives and I think trying to figure out where it fit in with the other took away from how much I enjoyed it as a whole.

Two important things here.
1. This review is an Advance Reader Copy review. I'm so grateful I was able to be a part of this process.
2. Pluralities is a piece of speculative fiction, in the sci-fi genre with gender and one's identity of self being important themes.

So let's start with the fact that yes it's a speculative piece. That part is established. It reads more like an art piece, a poem or a song, rather than the meat and potatoes sci-fi you may be used to. But despite all this I found it really struggled to find itself in it's own message. I found that the narrative itself frequently fell by the wayside to the delivery of the prose.

What this basically meant was, a lot of pretty things were said, but I still found myself re-reading parts to figure out what was actually happening to the characters on the page. Not only that, but some vital information was omitted, or important physical traits such as, for instance, the amount of eyes a character has [and where on their body] would be revealed towards the end of a book. This felt somewhat immersion breaking; especially when the character's physical appearance was referenced so often.

The whole book is only about 100 pages, but it's simultaneously too short and too long and I feel like it had a bit of a pacing problem. The first half started very slow and the only thing that kept me interested was the promise that somehow, the narratives would connect. And that's where the 'too short' comes in. The big reveals - which once again, suffered from the prose delivery suffocation - this time came in the form of a mental dissertation on self discovery. And in the end I was just a bid sad and somewhat frustrated for the story itself.

However, despite all that, I need you to understand that Pluralities is a beautiful piece of work. My copy is full of highlights and notes on beautiful, insightful, and witty passages - of which this book is full of. This is the kind of content that I want to see quotes of on my wall, in my diary, on my shirt and discussing passages at a coffee shop at a book club meeting. At it's core, the thoughts and feelings delivered are intrinsic, raw and profoundly human.

The aforementioned mental dissertation on self discovery was a wonderful piece of writing and like reading a character's mind solve a puzzle about themselves. The whole book is a deep piece of writing that I can't encapsulate in a single short review.

In the end, I'm leaving it with a 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4. The writing was beautiful and witty, but the narrative of the story just didn't get explored with the attention I had hoped for.

Thanks, Netgalley and Publisher for the opportunity to read and review!
This was truly wonderful read to me! It took me some time to catch on the intention behind the two POV's but once I got it, everything became clear and I could enjoy the narrative even more! The whole novel is a beautiful journey to the self! Definitely recommend it! It's unique!

In a way I almost feel unqualified to write a review of this story. It is both incredibly personal and validating to my own experience, and a piece of literature that deserves to be studied and analyzed in much more depth than I have the time or space to do here. It is also the kind of thing that would make a conservative scoff and say we keep inventing too many genders and it’s impossible for me to feel like an alien.

Basically, what I’m saying is everything about this book that needed to made sense to me, but explaining it to people who don’t already get it doesn’t feel worth it, in a similar way to the characters discussing how a conversation about gender with a cisgender ally is exhausting even though they support you.

Some people might balk at the complete lack of world building, but even as someone who dearly loves world building I was fine without it here. It wasn’t about it making literal sense, it was about the metaphor. About being reborn and remaking yourself to the point when you have to ask if you’re the same person at all. I will be thinking about this book, the beautiful writing, and how seen this author made me feel for a long time.

I feel a bit divided on this. Which I guess is very fitting. This relatively short story has some great ideas and interesting observations, and good descriptions of the journey of finding yourself. What it does not have is world building. In my opinion, this makes the story weaker. It's meant to be weird, which I'm good with, but I never felt like the two stories truly melted together in a way that made sense. The alien narrative I understood as a metaphor, but it didn't feel connected enough to the other part of the story to be taking up half of the narrative. I have so many questions.. Like: why is the alien a boy if he is a reflection of our mc? why is he a prince? what happened in the world to make it so that women must wear stamps to mark them as women? How come, in such a strict society, it is easily allowed for Theseus to transition and not wear a stamp anymore/wear his own stamp? Why does our MC have visions and what is the lore behind all of that?

I thought the whole dystopian society was interesting, but we didn't learn anything about it at all. The story could just as well have been set in current time, without any sci-fi elements at all, and not much would have changed. The visions were also not explained, they just happened and that was normal, but we don't really hear about other people getting them as well.
Basically, what I'm saying is that there were so many things I wanted to know about, but didn't get to hear about at all. On the other hand I DID get a whole chapter about some random alien casino gambling game that I didn't understand or care about at all.

A strange, short book on gender, how there is no particular way to be trans, purple alien princes, and interstellar constructions of sentience. I thought that this book was well-written, but the two storylines were so separated that they did not feel like they belonged in the same book at times, and I would have liked for the to connect more as opposed to feeling like I was reading two unrelated short stories in the same book with alternating chapters.

5 stars

ARC provided by publisher on NetGalley for an honest review

“I was a shapeshifter, worshipped for my pluralities…So many stories of self, huddled together to wander the void of my own uncertainty, fleeing and seeking in equal measure… Silence, silence. Perfect and terrible. The sympathetic resonance of the great dark universe, waiting to be heard.”

Avi Silver’s Pluralities is quite possibly one of my new favourite books. Pluralities is a piece of speculative fiction, which in the space of just over 100 pages, manages to trace two narratives; one exploring gender, the trans experience, and gender euphoria, and the other exploring connection, love, and what it means to be alive.

“It would be nice, to lie down. To disassemble. To let his atoms wander apart and return to the universe, perhaps to come back together as something better in another hundred million years. Perhaps it would be painful, but only for a moment. The pain of unbecoming would be nothing compared to the pain of trying to connect.”

Silver’s prose is something to be admired. Their voice carries a poetic quality, and the beauty of their prose, his constructions of language, could be placed on a level with the likes of Oscar Wilde. I found myself unable to tear my eyes from the text; Silver’s poetic voice carries beautifully into their prose, and results in a novella that feels like a piece of art to be taken apart, admired, respected, and cared for.

“There is a wound in Cornelius that Bo cannot see. There is something in his heart that it cannot find and repair, not in the way it wants to, and it fears what these messages will do if they take root. A bit of bad code can corrupt everything, and the ship does not want its friend to break.”

The narrative of Cornelius, an alien prince, and Bo, his best friend who happens to be a sentient spaceship, explores the beauty and depth of platonic love, as well as what it means to be alive, and the fragility of the organic body and experience. Bo and Cornelius are completely in harmony together, two lonely existences joined by an invisible, but infallible, cord within an infinite space of the universe. There is a deep, and profound relationship between these two beings, despite their differences, and this relationship is fundamental to their own realisation of self. Their relationship isn’t perfect, they have to learn to trust one another entirely, to trust the other’s judgment and decisions, and to respect that judgement, but the relationship is founded wholly on pure love.

“Because we’re no good without the other. Because even at your worst, you do not deserve the pain you house. Because I do not do enough to show just how much faith I have in you. Because I’ve run a thousand simulations through my core, imagining what our lives would be apart, and it just doesn’t work, Cornelius. It just doesn’t work.”

This narrative finds itself as an analogy within the exploration of gender, the body taking the role of the spaceship, the vessel, and the self becoming the passenger, allowing Silver to seamlessly weave two different stories into one novella.

“But here I was, a pale blue dot in a whole galaxy of possibilities. A nervous little spaceship, floating somewhere between the supposed binary. It was a nebulous place to be, but it was mine.”

Avi Silver’s depiction of the trans and nonbinary experience isn’t neat, it isn’t tidy, it isn’t the easy A to B of self-realisation - it felt so personal, so real, and I felt so seen within the pages. Being trans isn’t as simple as a journey from A to B, not every trans individual finds themselves neatly fitting on the binary of gender constructed by our society. Theseus says, “…my life experience [is] fundamentally different from cis guys… a way of choosing masculinity for myself, but masculinity that isn’t cis. Being a man on my own terms, I guess.”, verbalising the experience of recognising the vague idea of gender, yet feeling it is something wholly unique from the binary ideas of gender (“… a flickering light I didn’t have the words for… I understood, but I didn’t have the verbal language to describe just how much.”).

“The confession came in a burst of brilliant light, supernova of honesty long overdue, and then went dark. I grasped at my body with shaking hands, trying to keep myself from malfunctioning, falling from the sky into a million unfixable pieces.”

Silver articulates the peace found in “…the void that was left between identities…”, a reminder that there is no obligation to have to be able to verbalise your own experience of gender and self, whilst also recognising the wanting to be recognised by others: “Despite the fact that I barely understood myself, I wanted to be understood by others.”

“They looked at each other, the mysteries flowing between them like cosmic feminine ley lines, and I felt nothing… I didn’t know if it was more her pride or my shame that made me so determined to be a girl… Cult’s kind of a loaded word, but what I’m trying to say is even though I knew that I didn’t belong, leaving didn’t feel like an option.”

The relation of femininity and womanhood to a “cult” in the post-first, second and third wave feminism society, is a detail that I really appreciated in Pluralities. It’s something I also noticed in Felix Ever After, and the misguided accusation that being trans as an AFAB individual made you a “bad feminist” because you must hate womanhood and femininity. Seeing this self-doubt reflected on the page, the question of whether your experience is gender dysphoria, or whether it is internalised misogyny - “Was shying away from the divine feminine of my line an act of violence against my own? A projection of internalised misogyny?” - was a comfort. “Leaving” womanhood doesn’t make someone a bad feminist, or a victim of internalised misogyny, it’s just that it was never you to begin with: “…she had never been mine…”.

“The concept of gender euphoria was my lodestar, a promise that being trans wasn’t just about what felt wrong, but also what felt right.”

But Avi Silver also emphasises trans joy. At the heart of the narrative is the journey to gender euphoria. Pluralities is a story of hope, of joy, and peace within the notion of self. It’s a story on the value of trans voices - “Just because it took me more work to get here doesn’t mean that it’s less valuable…” - and the value of an expression and experience of gender beyond the binary.

“I couldn’t describe what it felt like to be myself, to be nonbinary, but I could read through the stories and decide whether or not they felt like mine.”

Quotes taken from e-ARC provided through NetGalley and may change in final published work

a fab piece of short speculative science fiction partly about an alien rogue prince and his sad spaceship, and partly about someone figuring out that they are non-binary with their trans man friend.

it's got one of the best explorations of how figuring out your gender identity feels, from the struggles to the complexity to gender euphoria & how good it is to speak to other trans+ people who /get it/ instead of cis people who you have to explain things to. so much media around being non binary focuses on dysphoria so it felt so good to read about non binary gender euphoria. can't wait to get my hands on a physical copy of this gorgeous book💖

Pluralities is a quick read just under 150 pages and Avi Silver somehow stretches them to make not one but two stories come to life in a transformative telling of what it means to no longer understand and be who you thought you were when you were born. To understand that you've truly never been that person even if everyone around you couldn't tell.

As a Cis Woman I can't imagine the ache of understanding your body is yours but the pieces you've tried to fit around it just don't. This story never feels like it's explaining this feeling *to* you or for your benefit. How She's and Cornelius's stories weave together makes you want to reread it and pick up on the things you missed in the beginning. It made me tear up, it made me laugh, it made me want to hug and hold the characters and protect them from their worlds.

Another ARC review and another one to add to my Pre-Orders list.