I really wanted to love this - an afrofuturist blend of The Handmaid's Tale and Get Out (as it was sold to me) sounds right up my street. Unfortunately wanting to love something doesn't make it happen, and I'm DNFing after 90 pages.

There's been a trend in recent years - particularly in SFF - for books to feel lightly edited if not unedited, and this is one of those books. It feels like an exploratory draft that's never been refined into a finished work. There are endless pages of exposition about the world and the body swapping that don't really manage to explain anything clearly, and meanwhile I have no sense of the characters and no indication of why I should care about any of this.

Despite all the exposition I don't feel like I understand the body swapping; the logistics of it, the politics of it, the reasons for it, the way it shakes society and the people within it. I don't understand how long the main character has been with her husband, whether she was with him before the body she's currently in and if not, how that works logistically if they knew each other beforehand. I don't understand her social position; her body is low status but she out earns her husband but her company is failing and also he controls her every move and is essentially abusive? It doesn't make sense.

Strong concept but unfortunately it failed to land for me.