Womb City

Thank you Netgalley and Publisher for letting me read this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

*Some spoilers ahead

Felt myself trudging along because the rules of this system felt impossible to grasp. And I felt the book was also struggling with this because the rules were being brought up over and over and over again. The body hopping stuff is just so incredibly lost on me. In general, the book was trying to do so many things until it felt convoluted on purpose. I felt the true essence of the book's purpose in the last 30% of the book. The strength of this book was the vivid imagery and beautiful writing. There were some insanely emotional and violent moments that, if you can stomach them, truly bring the characters and plot to life.

Before the murder trials were exposed later in the book, I was really confused why the main emotional conflict was “I can't believe the men in my life aren't getting punished like me” after the main character brutally murders (literally strangles, all by herself) a random girl. It felt almost comical that that's the argument we were making about being a woman: we both were there when I murdered her, why am I being punished more because I have a vagina? The consequence felt unbalanced to the crime, for sure. But the first half of the book felt like the MC was searching for a scapegoat, someone to blame, until it fell beautifully in her lap. I can't blame her for that and I'm sure she was meant to be written like that. But it was definitely frustrating as it undermined the legitimacy of the feminist lens to me, at least for the first half of the book. The ending definitely flips the script where we see the manipulation and abuse of the murder trials. I just wish we had gotten to this bigger conflict earlier because I was seriously struggling to take serious that we were meant to side with the MC.

I enjoyed the ending. A perfect society, without abuse and discrimination, can only occur when everything is wiped clean. Hard lesson to learn but it was creatively done.