I wish I could remember more details, likely a candidate for rereading, but I noted that it brought a lot of interesting ethical issues into the story that I found well worth considering.

I am catching up on books because of an illness so am going off of what I remember and a few notes I made at the time. My apologies for the brevity.

Unfortunately the format that Netgalley provided this book in was not easily readable, but I picked up this book again recently in a bookstore.
The book is well-written and the pacing is good, although there were some parts in the middle where I felt my attention shifting. I really like the idea, though - I have not read many books of this kind (people turning into animals/possessing them).
Overall, a decent book.

This book has such an original concept, so well executed, that I can’t believe I haven’t heard more hype about it. In a bleak near future, Katherine ‘Kit’ North is a nineteen-year-old woman who has been working for seven years as a phenomenaut. Her role is to project her consciousness into the bodies of lab grown animals to study creatures in their natural settings, and the ‘plasticity’ of brain required to do this usually only exists for a short time in young teenagers. When we first meet Kit, she is a fox, and throughout the book we experience several glorious sections of total immersion in another environment as Kit embodies creatures from whales to snakes. However, Kit has begun to have doubts about the ethics of her company, and embarks on a dangerous investigation in the ‘real’ world. 

At the moment of projecting consciousness into another creature, phenomenauts experience ‘Sperlman’s Shock’ – a painful sensory overload and panic as they adjust to their new forms. One of the best elements of the book is the bleeding of the rich life of any other being to the paucity of reality for humans “where Sperlman’s Shock is temporary torture, Come Home is insidious chronic doubt”. Kit’s identity crises readjusting to the human world will resonate with anyone who struggles to feel at home where they are supposed to belong.

“I weave through the morning commute. The humans here always strike me as improbably perpendicular, every chin thrust out with the confidence of a silverback. What is it that gives them such assurance? As if they’re all alphas. A suited man jostles past and I bare my teeth at his glare. This is what the city reduces you to – meat, meat that’s in the way”.

The Many Selves of Katherine North is more of a psychological book than it is purely science fiction, but the best speculative fiction is always more than the setting. This is a skilful examination of empathy and the capacity of the written word (and perhaps ultimately technology) for embodied simulation. As Kit’s perception of the world begins to fragment, the narrative of course becomes more disjointed and paranoid – but in a completely convincing way. This book deserves to be more widely read, and I look forward to more from Emma Geen.

This book sat on my Kindle for a good few months as I tried multiple times to get into it. It is an intriguing and imaginative concept, but the execution fell a little flat.
The story has a strong opening as we’re introduced to Katherine North and her unusual job. She works as a phenomenaut, which means she regularly projects her consciousness into other species in order to research the animal kingdom.
The story flits between past and present; in present day Katherine is on the run from the company she previously worked for, and in flashbacks we learn what lead up to her escape. It's a pretty well-used formula which I often enjoy, but I found this constant change meant I couldn’t engage well with either narrative
This writer does have flair and originality; it’s an imaginative concept and some of the scenes which see Katherine immersed into new animals were not only great to read but got me thinking. It’s not often you consider what it would be like to be a fox, or a spider.
But, for me, the technical jargon of this brave new world and the constant change of timeline meant I struggled to invest fully in the character and her situation.
The book did pick up in the final third – once I’d finally got the hang of things, and the two timelines began to come together. There’s a lot of potential here and some good ideas but, ultimately, I don’t think this is a book that I’ll remember a year after reading.